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students at Tyndale-Bibcoe s wcliool in Kaslimir jumping into 
the Jhelum Eiver 



THE WONDERLAND 
OF INDIA 



BY 

HELEN M. ROCKEY 

n 

AND , 

HAROLD BJ HUNTING 



MISSIONARY EDUCATION MOVEMENT 

OF THE UNITED STATES AND CANADA 

NEW YORK 



n^ 6 6' 



copyeight, 1922, by 

Missionary Education Movement 

OF THE United States and Canada 



Printed in the United States of America 

•OCT 22 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER 

I Our Indian Cousins 

II A Land of Many Races 

III Everyday India 

IV ^^KiNG Jesus Is Come'' 
V Schooldays .... 

VI Feeding the Hungry . 
VII Adventures in Healing 
VIII New Wonders in an Ancient Won 

DERLAND .... 

Word List .... 



PAGE 
1 

15 

29 
45 

62 

84 
97 

112 
125 



ILLUSTRATIONS 



Students at Tyndale-Biscoe^s school 

Frontispiece 

PAGE 

A village courtyard ...... 5 

Darjeeling 17 

The Taj Malial . 23 

An Indian cliarpoi 32 

A worker in brass 35 

A Hindu temple 41 

An Indian merry-go-round .... 46 

A native orchestra 48 

A fakir or ^'holy man" 53 

A village prayer meeting .... 59 

A mosque school 64 

A village mission school 65 

Athletics at Lucknow Christian College . 68 

Baseball in India 74 

Brahman girls of South India . . . 77 

Indian Girl Guides 80 

^^Missionaries in feathers'' .... 88 

The native plow 91 

A leper congregation 99 

Dr. Ida Scudder's Ford . . . . .109 



FOREWOED 

The stories in this book will show you 
that in some ways the people of India are 
different from us in America, and that in 
other ways we and they are very much 
alike. The differences help to make them 
interesting. But we hope you will agree 
with us that the likenesses are much more 
numerous and important. They are our 
brothers and sisters, and God is the com- 
mon Father of us all. 

The Authors 



CHAPTER ONE 

Our Indian Cousins 

The thatched roof of the mud house had been 
baking all day under the intense heat of the Indian 
sun. 

''If the rains would only come !" sighed Sonika/ 
as she scoured the last brass pot with mud and 
grass gathered from the door-yard. 

''When they come, you'll complain just as much 
because they keep on!" commented her brother 
Rama. "Let's go out and talk to Grandfather. 
Maybe he'll tell us about the Motherland. He 
always seems happy when he /s talking about 
India; have you noticed?" 

Under the shade of the big tamarind tree sat 
Grandfather, enjoying the shadows and the quiet 
of the early evening. A dignified, high-caste 
Hindu was Grandfather. He knew more, the chil- 
dren thought, than most anyone else could know. 
The long hookah he had been peacefully smoking 
had gone out, and as the children came near, the 
old man was reaching out his wrinkled hand to 
lift with small tongs a bright coal from a brazier 
at hand for that purpose. He lighted the pipe 
and drew slowly through the long tube the smoke 
that was pleasantly cooled in the water through 
which it passed. Rama liked the cheerful hubble- 

1 For pronunciation of foreign words see Word List, p. 125. 

2 



2 THE WONDERLAND OF INDIA 

bubble sound it made and watched the whole pro- 
ceeding with as much interest as if it were not a 
daily, hourly occurrence. 

Sonika was first to speak. ''Grandfather/' she 
said, ''and is it true, as the missionary Sahib said 
yesterday, that his ancestors and ours came from 
the same place? Are his children really our 
cousins 1 ' ' 

The old man smoked on without replying for 
several minutes, while the children, lying on the 
ground, dug their toes into the soft earth. They 
were used to long pauses, these gentle children of 
India. 

At length the grandfather began : ' ' Many cen- 
turies ago the white man's ancestors and ours 
lived together on the plateaus of central Asia. 
They were called Aryans. They were shepherds 
and wandered from one pasture to another where- 
ever they could best find food and water for their 
flocks. As their numbers increased, there was not 
enough room for all; many of them gradually 
moved to lands where food was more plentiful. 
Some went west to Europe, and most of the white 
races and nations of Europe and America are 
descended from them. Others still, perhaps at 
about the time of Joseph and his brothers, of 
whom the missionary Sahib tells us, made their 
way into India. Singing hymns in praise of their 
gods, and driving their flocks and herds before 
them, they poured over the passes in the moun- 



OUR INDIAN COUSINS 3 

tains and took possession of the plains of northern 
India. 

' ' And now tell ns about their gods ! ' ^ hroke in 
Sonika, as she always did just here in Grand- 
father's story, for she liked this part especially. 

''They worshipped the 'Bright Ones' — the sun 
and the moon and the stars; the sky, the dawn, 
and the storm." 

"And what was it the Sahib said about their 
words!" interrupted Rama. 

' ' I know ! ' ' exclaimed a new voice. 

The three turned quickly to see Bob, the son 
of the missionary Sahib, standing near with 
Peggy, his cousin, who had recently come to the 
village to visit. Peggy's father was a missionary, 
too, and she lived in the next district. 

"I have heard Father say," Bob continued, 
"that they all spoke a language called Sanskrit. 
It was something like the Grreek and Latin I am 
going to study when I go to college." 

"Yes," said Grandfather, "and Sanskrit was 
the parent of many of the languages spoken in 
our Motherland, India." 

"The Sahib said some of his words and ours 
are alike," put in Rama. "He said you have a 
word like our ag. What is it?" 

"Your a^," replied Bob, "means fire, doesn't 
it ? Agni was the Aryan name for the god of fire 
and from that we get our 'ignite,' meaning to 
burn." 



4 THE WONDERLAND OF INDIA 

**Ask your G-randfatlier to tell some more about 
India," whispered Peggy to Sonika. ''We have 
been listening behind the tree," she chuckled. 

''Tell some more, G-randf ather, " begged the 
children. But at that moment there entered the 
courtyard where they were sitting an old, old man. 

*'0h, here comes Shukboo!" shouted Eama. 
*'Shukboo is here! Shukboo is here!" he called, 
so that all the villagers who were near might hear, 
and they came, as fast as their occupations would 
let them, to gather about the old man. 

"Who's Shukboo!" asked Peggy as soon as she 
could make Bob and Sonika stop jumping up and 
down with glee. 

"Why Shukboo tells stories. Oh, he's great! 
Just you wait!" exclaimed Bob. 

It is a curious fact about India that so many 
of her customs are centuries old. We have 
changed our ways of living and of doing things 
century by century, year by year, almost day by 
day, but there are, in India, ways of doing things 
— customs — which have remained the same for 
thousands of years. And now, in exactly the same 
fashion as in centuries gone by, a Hindu story- 
teller had entered a courtyard in a village in 
India. About him quickly gathered a group just 
as in years gone by — boys and girls — and men too. 
No women were present, because it is not con- 
sidered proper for a caste woman to appear out- 
side her home. 



OUR INDIAN COUSINS 5 

While tliey sat upon the ground or lounged 
about, there were monkeys chattering on the 
thatched roofs of the low mud-houses which sur- 
rounded the courtyard, on intimate terms — some- 
times too intimate — with the listeners. 




Within the mud walls of this village courtyard are men and 
animals, beds, water jars, and, piled up in a corner, cakes of 
dried fuel — a combination not unusual in India. 

The boys and girls played together much as 
boys and girls do anywhere. They were lovable 
children, too, with their soft, brown, wondering 
eyes. 

The men and boys wore, for the most part, a 
'^one-piece'' suit called a dhoti, which is a long 
strip of cloth wrapped about the middle of their 



6 THE WONDERLAND OF INDIA 

bodies. But clothing is of no consequence and of 
little trouble to these Indian cousins of ours. 
Their bare brown arms and shoulders glistened 
in the sun. On their heads the men wore a pagri, 
a turban composed of eight yards of material 
wound around and around, its many folds pro- 
tecting the head from the hot Indian sun. A few 
of the men wore shirts too; as did some of the 
boys. Sprinkled thickly through the group were 
little naked brown babies. 

Although there were no older women listening 
to the tale of long ago, there were many little 
girls to be seen, each wearing one long piece of 
cloth, a sari, skilfully and picturesquely wound 
about them from tip to toe and ingeniously and 
mysteriously fastened without pin, hook, or but- 
ton. No troublesome hooks and eyes, no buttons, 
no tapes bring trouble every morning to these 
little Indian girls as they dress. And as for shoe- 
strings for either boys or girls ! No knots are 
rudely snapped as school-time hurries forward; 
there are no big shoe bills for Father at the end 
of each month, and no darning of socks and stock- 
ings for Mother, for no one in India ever wears 
stockings, and nearly everyone goes barefoot most 
of the time. 8ome people were wearing sandals — 
made of wood or of straw — and Peggy noticed a 
few men in sharply pointed slippers which flip- 
flapped as they walked. 

Peggy was fairly pop-eyed with interest, for 



OUR INDIAN COUSINS 7 

even though she did not live far away, some of 
the customs and even the clothes were slightly dif- 
ferent from those of the district where she lived. 
There was a little different twist to the pagri, a 
little change in the winding of the sari. Even the 
dialect was a trifle different, some words puzzling 
her. But for the most part, she could understand, 
and Sonika and she could talk together fairly well. 

After Peggy had looked at the people for some 
time, she began to see and hear more familiar and 
homelike sights and sounds. Yonder was a cow, 
munching straw in the corner of the yard. Near 
her was a pair of goats. Under her feet a few 
rather scrawny chickens were scratching in the 
dirt. 

^'Old Shukboo is going to begin in a minute,*' 
said Kama. So they gathered with the others 
around the old man. '^Shukboo is blind," said 
Bob to Peggy. ''That may be one reason why he 
remembers his stories so well, — he is not troubled 
with seeing everything that is going on about 
him." He remembered, too, hearing his father 
say that probably Shukboo finds comfort, as the 
long hours pass, repeating to himself the old tales 
of his native land. 

Soon Shukboo motioned with his hand. Sonika, 
Peggy, and Eamxa stopped their chattering, and 
the old man began to speak. 

''What is this he is telling ! Why, it is our dear 
old story of Cinderella," said Peggy to herself. 



8 THE WONDERLAND OF INDIA 

* ' Only, the good and lovely child has quite another 
name, hut it is surely the same story!'' When it 
was ended, Shukboo told another and another 
story, and, to Peggy's amazement, they sounded 
not at all unfamiliar. *^Can it be that stories are 
cousins, the same as people 1 ' ' she thought. 

''Oh, this is one we love!" whispered Sonika 
excitedly, and thereupon Bob and Peggy listened 
to their own ''Chicken-Little" and "Henny- 
Penny" story in an Indian dress. 

"Once upon a time," said old Shukboo, "a cer- 
tain rabbit lived beneath a palm tree. As he was 
sleeping, one day, some monkeys dropped a coco- 
nut which fell to the ground with a thud and rat- 
tled on a dry palm leaf. 'The solid earth is break- 
ing up,' thought the rabbit and, starting up, he 
fled without so much as looking behind him. A 
brother rabbit, seeing him scampering off as 
though frightened to death, asked, 'Why are you 
running!' Without looking back, the first rabbit 
replied, 'The solid earth is breaking up.' Where- 
upon the second rabbit ran after the first. They 
met a third rabbit, who asked why they were run- 
ning so fast. 'Because the solid earth is breaking 
up,' they replied in chorus, and he too began to 
run. And so one rabbit after another joined in 
the flight, until one hundred thousand rabbits were 
running together. In turn they met a deer, a boar, 
an elk, a buffalo, a wild ox, a rhinoceros, a tiger, 
and an elephant. And as each asked why the 



OUR INDIAN COUSINS 9 

others were running and were told that the earth 
was breaking up, they too took flight until it 
seemed as if all the animals in the world were 
running away. 

Then the Bodhisattva^ saw them. When he 
noted their headlong flight, he thought to himself, 
^I must save them, or they will all perish.' So, 
taking a lion's shape, he ran with great speed in 
front of them and roared like the king of beasts 
three times. 

Instantly, the animals, the one hundred thou- 
sand rabbits, the deer, the boar, the elk, the 
buffalo, the wild ox, the rhinoceros, the tiger, and 
the elephant all stood still, huddled together. 

'' 'Why are you running!' the Bodhisattva 
asked. 

^' 'The elephants know,' the others replied. 

'' 'Why are you running?' asked the Bodhisat- 
tva of the elephants. 

'* 'We don't know,' replied the elephants, ^the 
tigers know.' 

" 'Why are you running!' asked the Bodhisattva 
of the tigers. The tigers replied, 'We don't 
know, but the rhinoceroses know.' And the rhin- 
oceroses said, 'the wild oxen know,' and so on 
down to the rabbits. And when the rabbits were 
questioned, they pointed to one particular rabbit 

1 A word used among the Buddhists to describe a being of great 
wisdom who has almost attained Buddahood or complete enlight- 
enment. 



10 THE WONDERLAND OF INDIA 

and said, 'This one told us.' So this rabbit ex- 
plained that he had been lying nnder a palm tree 
and had heard a sound like a thud and had said 
to himself, 'The solid earth is breaking up.' 

Then the Bodhisattva took the rabbit on his 
back, and, with the speed of a lion, they went to the 
palm tree where the rabbit had been lying. As 
they approached, a monkey threw a coconut on the 
ground, and it fell with a thud, and then they 
knew that the noise had been only the thud of a 
coconut as it fell. So they came back and told the 
whole story to all the beasts, and the Bodhisattva 
bade them not to be afraid, but to go home. And 
having thus reassured them, the long procession 
started back. But verily, if it had not been for 
the Bodhisattva, all the beasts would have rushed 
into the sea and perished." 

When Bob and Peggy were again at home, they 
found Bob's father sitting on the veranda resting 
after a long day's work in the intense heat. 

''Father," said Bob, "why is it that there are 
so many different kinds of people in India?" 

"Not all of the people of India are Aryans," 
replied his father. "Before the Aryans came, 
the land was inhabited by a dark-skinned people 
called the Dravidian aborigines. The Aryans con- 
quered these people, drove them southward and, 
in part, made them slaves. The newcomers were 
very proud of their race and were anxious that 



OUR INDIAN COUSINS 11 

their children should have very little to do with 
the natives, and especially that they should not 
marry one another. To prevent this, the older 
people established a strict system of classes or 
castes, and made it a part of their religion that 
each caste should keep apart from the others. At 
first there were four great castes : the Brahmans, 
or priests ; the Kshattriyas, or warriors ; the Vai- 
shyas, or artisans, farmers and traders, and, low- 
est of all, the Sudras, the non- Aryan natives. So, 
to this day, it is the high-caste people of India 
who most nearly resemble the white races of 
Europe and America. Their skins are- indeed 
brown, but not so dark brown as the low-caste 
folk.'' 

'^Are these light-skinned people like Sonika and 
Eama brighter than the others!" asked Bob. 

''No," said his father. ''People used to think 
they were, but they are finding out that the boys 
and girls of the so-called lower non- Aryan castes 
are just as clever, just as reliable, and just as 
lovable as high-caste Sonika and Kama." He 
paused a moment thoughtfully before he contin- 
ued. ' ' They are all human beings and our broth- 
ers, even though some may be more closely related 
to us by race than others. One of the greatest 
wrongs, perhaps the greatest of all, of India in 
all its history has been race prejudice. For the 
caste system, as we have seen, grew out of race 
prejudice, and it has held back all races, high- 



12 THE WONDERLAND OF INDIA 

caste Aryan, Brahman, and low-caste Sudra alike. 
The system has continually grown more compli- 
cated and burdensome. 

At first there were four castes, as I said a mo- 
ment ago. Now there are nearly three thou- 
sand. Each different trade and occupation, 
such as the potters, the carpenters, the black- 
smiths, and so on, form castes by themselves. 
No member of any of these must come into con- 
tact with, or eat any food which has been han- 
dled by any person belonging to another caste. No 
one may change his caste or climb, by hard work 
and study, to a higher one. If a boy's father is a 
weaver, he must not try to be a carpenter or a 
clerk when he grows up. He too must be a weaver. 

And, worse still, underneath these three thou- 
sand regular castes, there are about fifty millions 
of outcastes, and they are treated like dogs. Most 
of these poor creatures are descended from the 
aborigines, but some are probably descended from 
members of higher castes who were so unfortunate 
as to break some of the caste laws, and who were 
therefore banished from their own people. Of 
course there can be little progress or prosperity 
for anyone, high or low, in a land where people 
must so strictly keep apart from each other, ex- 
cept within their own small groups. '' 

After a few minutes Bob said, ^'Father, why is 
Hassan different from Sonika and Eamaf 

^'Because Hassan is a Mohammedan," said 



OUR INDIAN COUSINS 13 

his father, ^^and Sonika and Eama are Hindus. '* 

*^ What's the differenced asked Bob. 

^^The Hindus,'' replied his father, ^^are those 
Aryans who came over the mountain passes. 
They brought with them the worship of the sun 
and moon and stars." 

^^ That's what Sonika 's grandfather said," 
broke in Peggy. 

^* Later on they began to worship idols. Some- 
times these idols were just a stone or a piece of 
wood. Sometimes they were an elaborately 
carved image. They kept on making gods and 
idols until they had them by the million. And all 
the time the caste idea was ever becoming a 
stronger part of their religion. 

^'And the Mohammedans, Uncle John," inter- 
rupted Peggy, ^' where did they come from!" 

^ ' Centuries later, a thousand years after Christ, 
some Afghan tribes swept down from the north 
just as the old Aryans had done, and inhabited 
the land. They brought with them a belief in one 
God, Allah, and in Mohammed, his prophet. The 
mere sight of the Hindus worshipping many gods 
was so hateful to them that they went about the 
country destroying temples and smashing idols. 
They even forced many Hindus at the point of 
the sword to become Mohammedans, and the strife 
over religion between the Mohammedan and the 
Hindu which began then is still going on. ' ' 

After a few minutes he added: ^'But you and 



14 THE WONDERLAND OF INDIA 

Peggy and other boys and girls like you must 
help our Indian cousins to undo the mistakes 
which those Aryans made, so long ago, in saddling 
upon their children through all these centuries 
that stupid and wicked caste system. And the best 
help you can give is to bring to this land of old 
and beautiful stories, a yet more wonderful story, 
and most wonderful in that it is true: the story 
of One who came into the world to be everybody's 
brother, and who, more than any other influence, 
has taught the world the sweetness and beauty of 
love." 



CHAPTEE TWO 

A Land of Many Races 

Caste divisions and religious divisions are not 
the only obstacles in the way of brotherhood in 
India. It is a land of many races besides the 
Aryans and the original natives. Nearly one hun- 
dred and fifty different languages and dialects are 
spoken within its borders. 

One may see many of these different races any 
day on the street of any Indian city. From the 
kind of garment a person wears, often one may 
tell the race to which he belongs, what his religion 
is, and the part of India from which he comes. 

If we were to go with Bob and Peggy to Luck- 
now, Bob's father would tell us that that man 
swaggering over there with a long beard dyed 
red, with baggy trousers which are caught in at 
the ankles, with a big turban and a long shirt-like 
coat and a fancy vest, is from the Afghan border, 
a Pathan in race and a Mohammedan in religion. 
Near him is a fat roly-poly man with loose-flowing 
draperies, a fancy hat on his head, a long, colored 
scarf around his neck, and an umbrella in his 
hand, to show his importance. He is a Bengali, 
that is, a native of Bengal, a province which lies 
at the lower end of the Ganges valley. In religion 
he is a high-caste Hindu. The woman covered 
from head to foot with a long white garment with 

15 



16 THE WONDERLAND OF INDIA 

only tiny holes for her eyes, is probably a Moham- 
medan. Stepping out of that palanquin which 
four men have been carrying, we catch a glimpse 
of another woman draped in a lovely salmon-pink 
silk robe. She holds her veil well forward so that 
it is impossible to see anything of her face. She 
is a very proper high-caste Hindu lady. The men 
who carry the palanquin are wearing very little 
clothing — only a long cloth knotted around the 
middle of their bodies. 

Behind this group comes a poor old woman, 
wearing about as little clothing as the palanquin 
bearers, yet with a wisp of a veil over her head 
and face. Why do the passers-by draw to one side 
to avoid walking near her? She is dirty, but that 
is not the reason. They avoid her because she is 
one of those ''outcastes'' who are supposed to 
defile any good Hindu whom they may happen to 
touch. Next we see the motor-car of one of the 
English residents, carrying a party of English 
friends. What a strange mixture of human be- 
ings ! How did they all happen to be living here 
together! 

If we glance at the map at the beginning of this 
book, we shall see that India is a great pear- 
shaped peninsula extending southward from the 
continent of Asia into the Indian ocean. All along 
its northern edge are the Himalaya Mountains. 
Bob hit upon a very good comparison when he 
said that India looks like an ice-cream cone. To 




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18 THE WONDERLAND OF INDIA 

the south is the pomt of the cone, and the moun- 
tains to the north are the ice-cream overflowing 
at the top. The Himalayas are the highest moun- 
tains in the world. Mount Everest, the highest 
peak, rising 29,000 feet above the sea level, has 
never been climbed, and only very recently have 
attempts been made to reach the top. There are 
other peaks almost as high. Even the passes 
through which run the roads from India to the 
north, northeast, and northwest, are covered with 
snow all the year round. 

Now look again at the map, and you will notice 
that almost all of the country south of the moun- 
tains lies below the Tropic of Cancer. This surely 
indicates that India is a hot country. Only in the 
extreme north is there any really cold weather, and 
no snow, except on the mountains. Even in the 
months of January and February the days are hot 
in the central and southern parts of India, al- 
though the nights are cool. There is, however, 
much variation in climate. In the Punjab prov- 
ince, in the northwest, January and February are 
chilly and disagreeable, especially as the ordinary 
house is not very well heated. One sits beside the 
fireplace and yet shivers. In the region of Cal- 
cutta, on the other hand, these months are de- 
lightful. The air is soft and balmy like an Ameri- 
can day in May. But about the first of March, 
even in North India, the hot weather begins. As 
the weeks go by, the heat from the sun becomes 



A LAND OF MANY RACES 19 

SO intense that you could almost cook an egg on a 
stone doorstep. In the middle of the day, during 
this season, few people try to do any work or even 
go out of doors. The foreigners and those natives 
who can afford it flee for refuge to the mountains. 
By the first of June this burning tropical sunshine 
has heated the entire land like a furnace, and, as 
a result, a moisture-laden landward wind begins 
to blow all over India. This wind is called the 
monsoon. It strikes the icy slopes of the Him- 
alayas, and, circling back, it pours its floods of 
waters on their slopes and on the plains which lie 
at their feet. The rain comes down in torrents. 
For three months the rainy season continues all 
across the northern part of the country. What is 
said to be the wettest spot in the world is to be 
found in Cherrapunji, in the hills of Assam, where 
there is an annual rainfall of 458 inches. 

Now put all these things together: the hot 
climate, the great snow-capped mountain wall to 
the north, and the enormous rainfall along its 
southern slopes, and you may easily infer one 
more fact of geography — that is, a great river, 
south of the Himalayas. And if you will look 
again at the map, you will indeed find the great 
Ganges Eiver flowing from west to east across 
northern India. 

The Ganges is one of the great rivers of the 
world. The plain across which it flows is com- 
posed of soil which, during long ages, the river 



20 THE WONDERLAND OF INDIA 

has washed down from the mountains. All 
through the dry season its water is carried by 
means of irrigation canals to the farms along its 
banks. It is not strange that to the Hindus it is a 
sacred river. They worship Mother Gunga, as 
they call her, and bring her otf erings. 

It is this great fertile river valley which ex- 
plains why, in India, many people of many races 
and languages jostle each other on the streets. 
Great rivers have always been magnets, drawing 
people to settle along their banks. And India, 
with her fertile Ganges valley, has been one of the 
most powerful of such magnets. It drew even 
Columbus, for it was in search of a shorter route 
to this land that he started on the voyage which 
led to the discovery of America. Sometimes men 
have dreamed of finding gold, silver, and precious 
stones in India; but the real wealth of the land 
has always been her broad and fertile plains. 

India's history has been one long record of in- 
vasions. The first of these known to history was 
that of the Aryans. Then, in the fourth century 
before Christ, came the Greeks under Alexander 
the Great. Although not many Greeks stayed in 
India after Alexander's death, there are still ruins 
of Greek buildings to be seen in northern India, 
and India's mothers still frighten their children 
when they are naughty by saying, ^^Iskander 
(Alexander) will get you!" 

The most important wave of invasion after 



A LAND OF MANY RACES 21 

Alexander began about five hundred years before 
Columbus discovered America. On the northwest- 
ern border of China there lived a wild and bar- 
barous people called the Mongols. In the course 
of time they were converted to the Mohammedan 
religion. By race they were related to the Turks. 
Driven by the same need of food as the early 
Aryans, they also began a series of raids to the 
west and south. One group of them swept into 
Europe, and came near overrunning the whole 
area. They did conquer large parts of Eastern 
Europe, and their descendants are living in Hun- 
gary and in other European countries today. 
Other groups of these Mongols crossed the passes 
of the Himalayas into India. At first they made 
only raids and went home with the loot which they 
had stolen. Then, of course, other Mongol armies 
set out, determined to get their share. And their 
Persian neighbors also made some trips to the 
rich land beyond the mountains. 

For centuries the people of India lived in con- 
stant terror of these Mongol raids. At length, one 
Mongol army decided to stay in India, and it set- 
tled down on the land which it had conquered. 
After several generations of fighting they had be- 
come so powerful that one of their kings, Akbar, 
was able to extend his sway over almost the whole 
of India. He and his empire descendants are re- 
ferred to in history as '^Moguls,'' that is the Mon- 
gol emperors, but he is known as the ^' Great 



22 THE WONDERLAND OF INDIA 

Mogul." It is interesting to note that the reign 
of Queen Elizabeth of England and of Akbar cov- 
ered almost the same period of years. 

Akbar, therefore, lived in the century following 
Columbus. He built an enormous fort at Agra, 
so complete that the whole city could be besieged 
for three years without being forced to surrender. 
The ruins of the fort, including the great public 
audience hall where every morning Akbar held 
court, may still be seen. Anyone who wanted jus- 
tice could go to this court and have his case de- 
cided by the Emperor. He was a lover of poetry, 
science, and art, and his closest friends were great 
scholars. He sincerely tried to help the people 
of India. 

Another great Mogul emperor was Akbar 's 
grandson, Shah Jehan. Near the shores of the 
Jumna river, which flows into the Ganges, this 
ruler had erected a wonderful building, which still 
stands in all its loveliness, and which is consid- 
ered, even yet, the most beautiful example of arch- 
itecture in all the world. It has a real story. The 
emperor had a beautiful wife, Mumtaz-i-Mahal, 
that is, ^'the pride of the palace," to whom he 
was devoted. *' Promise me," she begged of him 
when she was dying, ^'that you will build me the 
most beautiful tomb in the world," and Shah 
Jehan promised. The plans for the tomb came to 
the Emperor, so the story goes, in a dream. The 
marble and other materials for it were brought 



24 THE WONDERLAND OF INDIA 

from all parts of India, and it took twenty thou- 
sand workmen twenty-one years to build it. Trav- 
elers from all countries visit it every year. It is 
constructed entirely of white marble. In places, 
the marble is carved into designs so like delicate 
lace work that visitors almost always insist on 
touching it before they can believe that it is made 
of stone. The interior is inlaid with beautiful 
and expensive stones, agate, lapis lazuli, and car- 
nelian. It is called the Taj Mahal. 

Today, Mohammedans, many of them descended 
from the soldiers of Akbar, may be seen in all 
parts of India. More of them live in the north- 
west, however, than elsewhere. To some extent 
they have adopted Hindu customs ; but they do not 
worship idols. ^' There is only one God," they 
say, ^^and he is Allah, and Mohammed is his 
prophet." 

All of the early invaders of India, down to the 
time of the Mongols, marched down from the 
north over the mountain passes. Then came the 
time when men had become masters of the ocean. 
Even before Columbus discovered America, a 
Portuguese sailor named Vasco de Gama had 
sailed around the Cape of Good Hope, the south- 
ern tip of Africa, in a tiny sailing vessel and, after 
many tiresome months, landed at Calicut, in 
South India, the place from which calico got its 
name. He brought back with him a rich cargo of 
spices and wonderful stories of the wealth of that 



A LAND OF MANY RACES 25 

far-away land. From that time on it was by way 
of the sea, rather than the mountains, that traders 
and explorers entered India in search of gold. 
Soon there were Dutch, French, and English set- 
tlements at various places on the Indian coast. It 
never occurred to these fortune hunters that the 
natives of India had any rights or that the teach- 
ings of Jesus should govern their relations with 
the people of foreign countries. Indeed, we are 
only beginning to learn that lesson now. The 
English settlers in India, however, seemed to un- 
derstand better than those of other European 
countries that it would be to their own advantage 
to treat the natives with a certain degree of kind- 
ness and justice. So when the white traders of 
different nationalities began to be jealous and to 
fight one another, the English were more success- 
ful than any others in gaining native support. By 
the year 1857 a great part of India was governed 
directly or indirectly by the English through a 
corporation called the East India Company. 

In that year, however, there occurred a great 
mutiny, later to be known as the Sepoy Rebellion. 
One Sunday while the British troops at Meerut 
were at church, unarmed, they were fired upon 
by the sepoys, the native soldiers. For months 
after, in many parts of India, no white man's life 
was safe. In Delhi, Cawnpore, Lucknow and 
other cities, the English were besieged. Delhi 
and Cawnpore were captured, but Lucknow held 



26 THE WONDERLAND OF INDIA 

out. Troops from other parts of India were sent 
to the rescue as soon as possible, but it was many 
months before help came. Day after day, in the 
hot sun, the enemy attacked. It was difficult for 
the English to get to their only well, and so there 
was little water for the thirsty and wounded. Still 
they held out. One day a little Scotch girl, Jessie 
Campbell, cried out, ''The bagpipes! Dinna ye 
hear the bagpipes !'' Everyone listened, but all 
shook their heads. Finally, faint and clear, came 
the sound of bagpipes playing, ''The Campbells 
are coming, hurrah, hurrah!^' And they knew 
they were saved. 

After the mutiny was quelled, the government 
of India was taken from the East India Company 
and placed directly under the British crown. 
While they themselves admit they have made 
many blunders, the British have done much for 
India. They have built railroads so that one may 
travel right through tiger jungles by train. Where 
formerly the people of different castes were 
widely separated, today in the third-class car- 
riages are huddled crowds of people from all parts 
of India, speaking many different languages. 
Even Brahmans and outcastes sit in the same sec- 
tion, and the Brahman does not stop to question 
if he is losing his caste. In the train, at least, 
caste is forgotten. 

Before the British established post-office and 
telegraph systems India was largely cut off, not 



A LAND OF MANY RACES 27 

only from the rest of the world, but one section 
of her own country could only rarely communicate 
with another section. Now, however, messages 
are sent to the tiniest, most distant village. 

Motor buses, too, now run along country roads, 
and there is likely to be a greater thrill riding in 
them than even our western bandits could provide. 
Not long ago one of these buses was making a 
trip when the driver suddenly noticed, directly in 
front of him and not many yards away, a tiger 
crouched ready to spring. He honked his 
horn as loud and as fiercely as he possibly 
could, hoping to frighten the beast, but with a 
spring, the tiger leaped onto the radiator of the 
on-coming machine and, with one stroke of his 
mighty paw, smashed in the glass windshield. 
But the driver had put on speed and, as the car 
sv/erved with the impact, the great animal fell 
off and was crushed to death under the wheels. 

There are waterworks, too, due to the British, 
great irrigation canals, and, of course, bridges 
over the rivers. The Brahmans laughed when the 
great bridge over the Ganges at Benares was 
started. ' ' What ! Harness Mother Gunga ! ' ' they 
said. At first they only jeered and laughed, but 
then, incensed by what they considered sacrilege, 
angry mobs gathered and burned the build- 
ings of the bridge builders and tried to burn the 
bridge itself. That was in 1904. Today when a 
train approaches the bridge, someone cries : 



28 THE WONDERLAND OF INDIA 

^'Mother Gunga!'' The Hindus rusli to the win- 
dows. Some throw in money, some count their 
rosaries, others pray. Meanwhile, the train rushes 
on, leaving the river far behind, and the Hindus 
sit back comfortably and perhaps start to gossip 
about the latest street-car some ^' crazy" man says 
he saw in Cawnpore. ^'Arrah, a cart that goes 
along without any horse, or any 'puff, puff' (loco- 
motive) and that stops at every corner." His 
hearers shake their heads and smoke. "Who 
knows ! ' ' they say. 

Such is India, today. Hindu, Mohammedan, 
Christian ; Aryan, Mongolian, Englishman ; all live 
together — yet separate. And the distinctions of 
caste are even more rigid and impossible than 
those of race, language, or religion. Can such a 
country ever become a land of neighbors, in the 
sense of the good Samaritan who had pity on the 
wounded man! Can it ever be ruled by the spirit 
of brotherhood! Only when the King of Broth- 
erly Love enters the land to stay. 



CHAPTER THREE 

Everyday India 

Now tliat we have learned something of the 
history of India, let ns go back for another visit 
to the home of Sonika and Rama. 

We know already, of course, that they live in a 
village. But do we know that India is a land of 
villages? There are more than 700,000 of them. 
All around each village are the fields which the 
people go out to till. Until recent times it would 
have been dangerous for Indian farmers to live 
in separate houses as in America. There were 
too many robbers. Even today, a Hindu farmer 
is afraid to live alone with his family in an iso- 
lated house. And even if there were no robbers, 
there are, in many places, dangerous wild beasts, 
such as man-eating tigers. But while robbers and 
tigers are real enemies in open places, the Indians 
fear them almost less than the ''demons^' which 
are supposed to be everywhere, even in the vil- 
lages. Because of their ignorance and supersti- 
tion about demons, the people build their houses 
close together. 

The house where Sonika and Rama were born 
is made chiefly of mud, with bamboo poles for 
rafters, and a thatched roof. The bare ground is 
the floor. There are no windows, or very few, 
and only one door. Large granaries, built of 

29 



30 THE WONDERLAND OF INDIA 

dried mud, may serve as partitions between rooms. 
The women of the family have one end of the 
house for their sleeping place. The most impor- 
tant room is the kitchen. It is not only the place 
where food is prepared, but also a kind of family 
chapel, for it is in the kitchen that the people keep 
their shrine and the image of their god, which is 
often only an oddly-shaped stone. This shrine is 
kept decorated with garlands of marigolds and 
near it there is always a tulsi plant, which is con- 
sidered sacred. The reason for this is that, ac- 
cording to Indian mythology, one wife of the god 
Krishna was such a pattern of all that a girl or 
woman should be that she was changed into a tulsi 
plant. This plant is kept in every Hindu home to 
remind little sister how she should behave. 

Near the shrine are the family water-pots. In 
the Hindu religion it is water more than anything 
else which is supposed to be either '' defiled" or 
^^pure." Dry food, such as flour, sugar or rice, 
a Hindu will take from anyone, no matter what 
his caste may be, but rice cooked in water or any 
moist food he will not touch if someone of a lower 
caste has been near it. So it is especially neces- 
sary to keep the water-pots safe from 'defile- 
ment. ' ' These big earthenware pots are kept filled 
by the women and girls. There is, of course, no 
running water in the house, not even a pump in 
the back-yard. There is generally only one well 
to a village, and this is frequently a long distance 



EVERYDAY INDIA 31 

away. It takes a good many trips to draw water 
for a large family. 

Not far from ttie water-pots is a low fireplace 
made of bricks, where the food is cooked. In most 
parts of India coal or wood or charcoal are too 
expensive for poor people to use. So one of the 
main chores every day for the boys and girls is 
to gather every little twig and chip which they 
can pick up under the trees and along the sides 
of the road. The chief fuel is dried cow dung 
mixed with straw. Inasmuch as there is no chim- 
ney to the fireplace, whenever cooking is being 
done, the house is filled with smoke. Almost 
everything in a Hindu house smells and tastes, 
to a certain extent, of smoke. 

There is very little furniture in a Hindu house 
— no chairs or tables, and only rude rope-strung 
beds, or charpoys. In low-caste homes even these 
are often missing, the people simply lying down 
wherever they choose, wrapped up in a rug, if 
one is needed. For what little light is needed 
after sunset, there is a saucer of oil, with a string 
lying over the edge for a wick. During the day 
this lamp is kept in a niche in the wall. Such a 
house would seem bare in America, but there 
would not be room in an Indian home for all our 
tables and chairs and other furniture — there are 
too many people. 

An Indian family consists not merely of father, 
mother, and children; but there are also many 



32 THE WONDERLAND OF INDIA 

uncles and aunts and cousins. When a Hindu is 
married, instead of going house hunting, he al- 
ways brings his wife back to his own old home 
where he himself was born and brought up. If 
the family in time becomes too large for the 




On her charpoi, this little Indian girl dreams by night as well 

as plays by day. 

house, additions are built on. There are some 
villages in India which are made up entirely of 
one great house inhabited by one of these large 
Hindu ^'families." There is no danger that the 
children will be lonesome, for besides all the 
cousins, there are the cow, the oxen, the goat, and 
the chickens, all of which sleep at night in the 
courtyard. 

When mealtime comes, the children spread out 
their hands and into them their mother puts an 



EVERYDAY INDIA 33 

earthenware bowl or perhaps only a large green 
leaf. On this leaf she pours some kind of cereal, 
sometimes rice, but more often millet, which is a 
coarse grain, cheaper than rice and seldom grown 
in America. On top of this cereal the mother 
pours some curry, a sauce made of pepper and 
other hot-tasting herbs. That is the dinner, nine 
dinners out of ten, of a boy in a poor family in 
India every day, not only this year, but next year 
and the year after that. There are, of course, 
other kinds of food, especially for those who can 
afford to pay for them. Sometimes there are 
cakes made of meal and baked over the fire. For 
wheat-cakes, called chappattis, the mother grinds 
the wheat in a stone mill just like the hand-mills 
of Bible times. Sometimes a family has beans or 
peas for dinner or soup made from them. They 
also have milk, but Indian cows do not give very 
much, as compared with American cows. Poor 
people generally have to sell what little milk they 
get, or butter made from it, in order to get money 
for other things. Clarified butter, or gliee^ is con- 
sidered a great delicacy in India. 

Once in a great while a child may get a taste 
of meat. High-caste Hindus, however, are strict 
vegetarians and never touch meat of any kind. 
But low-caste people are glad to eat most kinds 
of meat when they can afford it, which is very 
seldom. 

Dinner in a Hindu home is generally in the 



34 THE WONDERLAND OF INDIA 

middle of the day. There is ordinarily no break- 
fast and no supper. One is lucky to get a dinner. 
When dinner time comes, a rather solemn religious 
ceremony takes place. First the members of the 
family wash themselves according to a certain 
ritual, and then they offer some of the food to the 
household god. Then each man and boy takes his 
plantain leaf, or his earthenware dish filled with 
rice or millet, and sits down on the floor with his 
back to the others and eats in silence. It would 
seem unsociable to us. Still more unsociable is 
the custom of having the women wait until all the 
men have finished. No Indian woman, except one 
here and there in a family that is giving up the 
old customs, ever eats with her husband. It seems 
very pitiful that what should be the happiest time 
in a family's day, that is, dinner time, should be 
so spoiled for them by useless and unjust religious 
rules. 

The day's work in most Hindu families begins 
at dawn. During the heat of the day everybody 
rests. Then along toward evening there is more 
work to do. The children begin to help around 
the house very early in life. The girls must sweep 
the dirt floor, with a broom made of twigs. The 
boys must drive the cows and the goats out to the 
jungle. If the boy's father is a carpenter or a 
weaver or a blacksmith, or belongs to any special 
trade, he soon begins to help at that trade. 

The members of each trade form a caste and 




Q H. li . Feryt'f, Lahore, India 
Within their own dooryards, workers in brass hammer out by 
hand pots and kettles and most of the dishes used in an Indian 
household. 



36 THE WONDERLAND OF INDIA 

live together. In the towns you will find one 
street called the weavers' street, another called 
the blacksmiths' street, and so on. Or whole vil- 
lages may be given over to some special trade. 
Sometimes before one enters a village, one can 
tell by the smell (as in the case of the leather 
workers) what trade it belongs to. Most of the 
work in these trades is done in the homes of the 
people, rather than in special shops. The car- 
penter or the farmer has his tools, the blacksmith 
has his iron, the coppersmith his copper, or the 
potter his clay, in the same room where he sleeps. 
The children watch him as he works. By-and-by, 
when a boy is ten or eleven years old, he will 
begin to learn his father's trade. 

The chief industry of India is farming. Many 
different kinds of crops are raised. Beside the 
grain crops, such as rice, wheat, and millet, India 
produces great quantities of sugar, tea, cotton, 
and jute. Practically all of our gunny sacks are 
made from jute that was raised in India. What- 
ever the crop may be, if the boy's father is a 
farmer, he will soon be doing some of the work. 
And farm work in India is very hard work indeed. 
Until recently no modern agricultural machinery 
was used. A farmer's tools consisted of a small 
wooden plow with a sharp point for a harrow, 
which only just scratched the surface of the soil, 
a sickle, a mattock, or heavy hoe, a wooden fork, 
and a club for pounding the hard lumps in the 



EVERYDAY INDIA 37 

soil. Very few farmers know anything about other 
tools or machinery. In some parts of the country 
the fields are watered by irrigating ditches during 
the dry season. The water is pumped from the 
reservoirs by oxen on treadmills. One of the 
most important of a small boy's chores in such 
districts is to keep the oxen moving and the pump 
working. 

And how about games! How do Sonika and 
Eama and the others play? Indian children have 
a natural love of play, just like the boys and girls 
of America. Indeed, two famous indoor games, 
parchesi and chess, were invented in India. But 
alas, there is so much work to be done that many 
a Hindu child scarcely has a chance to learn to 
play at all. 

Still, Kama knows how to fly a kite. And he 
probably can make his kite '^fighf another boy's. 
He will rub his string with a mixture of clay and 
sand, and then when the ^' fight" is on, he will work 
his kite into such a position that he can saw the 
other boy's string with his own, until it breaks 
and the other kite soars away and is lost. 

The family goat is often a great pet with the 
children. Sonika has her mud dolls, and 
she also gets much pleasure from jingling her 
ornaments. Indian girls have many trinkets, 
although usually not until they are married. 
Even the poorest have rings and bracelets of pew- 
ter or brass. Of course the wealthy people have 



38 THE WONDERLAND OF INDIA 

silver and gold ornaments. Not only do the 
women and girls wear rings and bracelets, but 
anklets and toe-rings and earrings galore. Wher- 
ever there is a chance to hang a bit of ornament, 
they love to put it on. 

The happiest times in India are special celebra- 
tions of one kind or another. One of these is the 
ceremony of putting on the sacred cord. If the 
little Hindu brother belongs to one of the upper 
castes, he receives from his religious teacher, some 
time after his fifth year, the sacred cord which 
he wears for the rest of his life. It consists usu- 
ally of three coiled strands and is worn over the 
left shoulder and under the right arm. Before 
that time he is considered as just a child and eats 
and sleeps with his mother. After the cord cere- 
mony, he is a man. If a man's cord breaks, he 
dares not speak or scarcely breathe until another 
is put on; so sacred is it considered. The exact 
age selected for putting on the sacred cord de- 
pends upon the boy's horoscope. The ceremony 
is continued for several days, and the occasion is 
made a very joyful one. There are feasts to which 
friends are invited. Even poor, neglected little 
sister receives a sweetmeat while the priest is 
going through the many ceremonies in honor of 
brother's having now become a man. 

Weddings also are festive occasions. To us the 
marriage customs of the country seem very un- 



EVERYDAY INDIA 39 

reasonable and often cruel. Young people in India 
are not allowed to choose each other for husband 
and wife. The match-making is always done by 
the fathers with the help of the village barber, 
who, because of his occupation, knows everybody. 
The bride and groom seldom see each other until 
after they are married! The worst of these cus- 
toms is the early age of marriage, especially in the 
case of the girls. It is considered disgraceful 
for a girl not to be married by the time she is 
twelve. Little Hindu sister has very little reason 
for gladness on the dawn of her wedding day. 
Nevertheless, the wedding itself is made a time of 
as much happiness as possible. The picture of 
Ganesh, the Hindu god of good luck, is painted on 
the doorway of the groom's house. For five days 
or more the wedding guests are feasted. The 
fourth day is considered the most important. 
There must be at least one hundred different kinds 
of food for that day's feast. Different kinds of 
pickles, however, may count as different foods. 
On the day of the wedding proper there is a pro- 
cession to the bride's home. The bridegroom goes 
first, on horseback, dressed in his best clothes. 
After him there usually comes a band composed 
of banging drums and wailing flutes and some- 
times a bagpipe or two. After a time, they return, 
bringing the bride back with them to the house of 
the bridegroom. There are more ceremonies, and 



40 THE WONDERLAND OF INDIA 

then the guests go home. The fun is over. For 
many a little child-bride all that remains is a life 
little better than slavery. 

The people in India are perhaps by nature the 
most religious in the world. Almost every act in 
their lives is connected in some way with a re- 
ligious belief or ceremony. The early Aryans 
brought with them their own system of beliefs in 
gods and goddesses. Among them were wise men 
who saw and taught that there is really only one 
God, whose presence is in all life. This old Hindu 
teaching may be found in their ancient sacred 
books called the Vedas. It is very influential 
today among the educated classes. The religion 
of the common people, however, is a mass of super- 
stitions; giving offerings to grinning, hideous 
idols and charms to scare away the demons. In 
their temples they do not have weekly religious 
services like those in our churches. But on holy 
days they go to their temples to worship. This is 
done mostly by the men. The women are only al- 
lowed to come and bring gifts to the god. Every 
morning the priests of the temple have to awaken 
the god by ringing bells or clanging cymbals. Then 
they are supposed to bathe him, pour melted but- 
ter over him, and place food before him. When a 
man comes to w^orship, the priest rings the bell 
to make sure that the god is listening. Then the 
worshipper makes his present and prays for what 
he wants. No one in India ever goes to a god 




The water in front of this Hindu temple is a sacred pool in 
which people bathe as a part of their worship. The temple ele- 
phant also bathes in the sacred water. 



42 THE WONDERLAND OF INDIA 

without a present. When he has completed his 
worship, the priest marks his forehead with a cer- 
tain sign so that all the world may know that he 
has done his religions duty. In the evening the 
priests put the god to sleep again. 

On the whole, it is not a very happy life that 
our little Hindu brother and sister lead. The 
great majority of boys and girls grow up under 
the dark shadow of a poverty worse than anything 
we know. It is said that millions of Hindu peas- 
ants seldom have enough to eat, even in years of 
plenty. When the famine years come, their suf- 
fering is pitiful. 

Beside their poverty, the people of India suffer 
terribly from diseases. They know nothing of 
modern sanitation. We have seen how careful 
they are to keep their water-pots ceremonially 
clean; would that they knew the importance of 
keeping their water clean instead of swarming 
with disease germs ! During the rainy season 
malaria-bearing mosquitoes are all too common. 
The native way of warding off an epidemic from 
a village is to put a saucer of milk and sugar by 
the roadside with a few silver coins in the bottom 
of it. It is thought that the pestilence demon may 
find it and be appeased. It is not strange that the 
land is so frequently scourged by terrible epi- 
demics of cholera and the plague, and that ma- 
laria, smallpox, and typhoid fever are always 
raging somewhere in India. 



EVERYDAY INDIA 43 

Now and then some of India's sons have had 
pity on their brothers and have tried to help them. 
About six hundred years before Christ a young 
Indian prince named Gautama grew heartsick at 
the sight of so much misery everywhere and fled 
from his luxurious home in search of a way of 
peace for himself and others. After many wan- 
derings, there came to him, one day, like a light 
from above, the idea that the way out of unhappi- 
ness is to forget one's self. This new vision of 
truth he set himself to proclaim to men. He gath- 
ered disciples and taught them what he called the 
Eightfold Path, of which the substance was to re- 
nounce all selfish pleasures, to abstain from all 
malice, and to overcome evil with good. Thus was 
founded the religion which came to be known as 
Gautama, this religion was spread all over Indi^- 
_CBuddhism. Some two or three centuries after 
-mid carried to other countries of Asia largely 
through the efforts of a very good and able king 
named Asoka. This man is notable in history as 
one of the few kings or emperors who have re- 
fused to be a military conqueror and chose rather 
to rule through the power of truth. He gave large 
sums to Buddhist teachers and missionaries for 
the spreading of the new doctrine. He founded 
public parks, hospitals, and schools. He also 
caused wells to be dug and shade trees to be 
planted. He tried to civilize the wild tribes of 
central India. He should be better known by us 



44 THE WONDERLAND OF INDIA 

of the Western world, for he was really one of the 
great characters of history. 

This new religion, however, was not popular 
with the rich and powerful. It made little of caste, 
and the proud Brahmans opposed it for that rea- 
son. In the course of time its teachers were 
driven from the country, and today there are few 
Buddhists in India proper. The large majority 
of Indian children probably never heard of Gau- 
tama or never saw a Buddhist priest. The old 
superstitions and the selfish, cruel customs came 
back again and, despite the advance made in the 
past hundred years by Christianity, they still pre- 
vail in large measure. 

"What India needs is One greater than Gautama 
to lift her from her misery. 



CHAPTER FOUR 

' ' Kjng Jesus Is Come " 

For days Rama and Sonika had been talking' 
about the mela. ''Of course you're going," they 
said to Bob and Peggy. ''Everybody goes to the 
melaf 

Now in India melas are religious festivals. 
People attend them partly for fun and partly to 
gain favor with the gods. All over India there are 
sacred places where these melas are held from 
time to time, and to which great crowds of people 
come. One of the largest is held in the winter of 
each year at Allahabad, where the sacred river 
Ganges and its largest tributary, the Jumna, flow 
together. To bathe there at the time of the mela 
is to receive, so the people think, a special blessing 
from "Mother Gunga." Every twelfth year the 
mela held at this place is thought to be especially 
sacred, and millions from all over India attend. 
It is estimated that in 1918 over two million people 
were in or by the river at one time. They came 
on foot, by ox-cart, by horse, by train. A regular 
city is always laid out especially for these crowds, 
and it has to be carefully policed, for, in their 
eagerness to get to the river, riots are likely to 
take place. 

Bob and Peggy could scarcely wait for the long- 
anticipated day to come. Everybody in the village 

45 



46 



THE WONDERLAND OF INDIA 



who could possibly get away went, — some on foot, 
some in ox-carts. 

^^Why, it's just like going to a county fair back 
in America!'' said Peggy's mother, who had not 
been in India very long and who had never at- 
tended a mela. 




H. R. Ferger, Lahore, India 
The merry-go-round at an Indian mela has a cheerful squeak and 
creak that is as effective as music in telling boys and girls where 
it may be found. 

The roads were crowded with people, laughing 
and talking. Everybody seemed to be having a 
good time, and yet it was a religious festival to 
which they were going. 

The nearer they got to the village where, on the 
banks of the sacred river, the mela was to be held, 
the more Bob and Peggy felt that they were on 
their way to a circus. Within the village was the 
sacred shrine, but also what sights and sounds! 



"KING JESUS IS COME" 47 

There were peddlers everywhere selling sweets 
and toys. Here was an odd looking" merry-go- 
round made of rope swings which hung from an 
iron ring whirled by hand around the pole in the 
center. There was the queerest looking Ferris 
wheel one could imagine, made of wood and turned 
creakingly by hand. 

There were other sights totally unlike anything 
to be seen in America. Again and again, they 
came upon '^holy men,'^ or sadhus, most of whom 
were torturing themselves in some strange way. 
Here was a man hanging head downward over a 
slow fire. There was another man who had held 
one arm above his head for so long that it had 
withered. In the crowd gathered around these 
men, Peggy spied Rama. ^'What are these men 
doing, Ramaf she asked, going up to him. 

'^Why, they are ^holy men.' They do these 
things to get merit with the gods. And that is why 
we come to the mela,^^ he replied. 

By-and-by Bob's father and mother and Peggy's 
father left the others. The two children and Peg- 
gy's mother wandered about among the crowd, 
watching the many sights. 

Suddenly they heard the sound of music and 
singing, and they caught something in the words 
about Yisu. 

''Those are the Isai-log (the Jesus people)!" 
exclaimed Rama, who had joined them again. 
''Let's go near them." 



48 



THE WONDERLAND OF INDIA 



As they came within sight, Peggy exclaimed ex- 
citedly: ^^Why, there's Uncle John, and there's 
Daddy too!" Sure enough, there they stood in 
the group about a band of native musicians. 
There were only a few white people, but there 




Indian hymns sung to Indian music played on Indian instru- 
ments by native Christians are doing much toward bringing the 
people to know and to love Christ. 



were a number of the brown people of India, sing- 
ing Christian songs to old Hindu airs which were 
being played on instruments curious enough to 
Western eyes. 

After a time the music ceased, and Bob's father 
began to speak. He told the people about the 
loving Father who cared for them all. The poor, 
tired, work-worn people of India heard of One 
who said, ^'Come unto me, all ye that labor and 



"KING JESUS IS COME" 49 

are heavy laden, and I will give you rest/' It 
is almost impossible for people in America to 
know liow that must sound to the people of India, 
who are always, always seeking rest,— and seek- 
ing it in vain, — not only rest for their tired bodies, 
but rest from the awful superstitious fears under 
which they live. Their entire religious life and 
even their social life is a quest for peace, for pro- 
tection from demons, from spells, and from pun- 
ishments which they believe their gods are send- 
ing upon them. Into this Hfe-long, daily fear, 
imagine there coming in calm, even tones, ' ^ Come 
unto me, and I will give you rest. ' ' 

Into this strange land of superstitions and 
dreams, of ugliness and beauty, Christianity first 
came many centuries ago with its message of love. 
The modern Christian movement in India, how- 
ever, may be said to have begun with the work of 
four great pioneers — Ziegenbalg and Pliitschau, 
who went to South India early in the eighteenth 
century, Schwartz of Tanjore, who began his work 
in 1750, and William Carey, who landed in Cal- 
cutta in 1793 and who is often called ''the father 
of the modern missionary enterprise.'' 

Carey, born in England, in 1761, was a Baptist 
local preacher and, while making shoes for a liv- 
ing, preached the gospel as the main interest of 
his life. After a time he felt that he must go to 
India as a missionary. Most of his friends scoffed 
at and ridiculed him. How could he possibly get 



50 THE WONDERLAND OF INDIA 

the money to go? they asked; and when he got 
there, how could he preach to such people as the 
Indians? At length, however, he was able to in- 
terest enough people in his plans so that he raised 
his passage money, and he and his wife sailed for 
India. 

The East India Company refused to let him 
work in their territory, but he found shelter in 
the Dutch settlement at Sarampore. To support 
himself and his family, he worked at first as su- 
perintendent in an indigo factory. In the course 
of five years he had learned the Bengali language, 
had travelled through the two hundred villages 
of the district, had held daily religious services 
for the thousand workmen in the factory, and had 
translated the New Testament into the Bengali 
language. He prepared the first Bengali diction- 
ary; he set up the first printing press in India 
and prepared type for it in the Bengali alphabet ; 
and in the course of his life he translated the 
Bible into thirty-six different dialects. The Brit- 
ish government appointed Mr. Carey professor of 
Bengali, Sanskrit, and Marathi in the government 
college in Calcutta. 

Beside his regular work of preaching and trans- 
lating, this great missionary pioneer helped to 
start almost every kind of work carried on today 
by the missionaries. In a time when others felt 
that a missionary should do nothing but preach, 
he wrote to his supporters at home: ^'I wish you 



"KING JESUS IS COME' 51 

could send me a few instruments of husbandry; 
that is, scythes, sickles, plows, wheels, etc., and an 
assortment of garden and flower seeds and seeds 
of fruit trees.'' In 1800 he formed the Agricul- 
tural and Horticultural Society of India before 
there was such a society in England. Whatever 
would help people to better lives, he considered 
a part of his work as a missionary. 

Carey tried for years to persuade the British 
government to make a law forbidding the poor 
superstitious Hindus from throwing their children 
into the Ganges as religious offerings and also 
putting a stop to suttee, or the burning of widows 
on the funeral pyres of their husbands. He finally 
succeeded in getting this law passed. The proc- 
lamation which forbade suttee was sent to him by 
the government to translate into the native lan- 
guage It arrived on a Sunday just as he was 
starting for church, where he was to preach. 
Throwing off his coat, he sent another man to 
preach and set to work on the translation. ''For," 
said he, ' ' the delay of an hour may mean the sac- 
rifice of many a widow." 

The work started by Carey was followed up 
with great energy by others. All the great de- 
nominations of Great Britain and America have 
sent missionaries to India. Churches have been 
built in every part of the country. In all the lead- 
ing cities, such as Calcutta, Bombay, Madras, etc., 
there are large native churches with native Indian 



52 THE WONDEKLAND OF INDIA 

pastors. There are between fifteen and twenty 
million Protestant native Christians in India. 
What is more important, the spirit of the love of 
Jesns has indeed been like a leaven in the life of 
the people. Many of the most prominent native 
leaders today, even though not calling themselves 
Christians, say that they are trying to follow the 
teachings of Jesus. 

How does a missionary go about his work of 
showing these people what Jesus Christ might 
mean to them! Like Carey, the missionaries to- 
day use many and various methods. It is quite 
easy and natural for a missionary to gather a 
crowd around him at a mela, for the people are 
used to seeing religious or ^'holy" men there. 
But although it is easy to gather a crowd, it is not 
so easy to win their attention. Very often the 
people talk and laugh among themselves and then 
wander away. But again, others really listen to 
the preacher's message, and sometimes their 
hearts are touched. Perhaps months or even years 
after, some new pupil will come to the missionary 
school or ask to join the church, and it will be 
found that he merely heard of Christ at a mela, 
and the tiny seed took root. 

Back of all missionary methods, the one great 
instrument is kindness. People in India are like 
people anywhere else. They may not always un- 
derstand spoken words, but the meaning of loving 
deeds they never miss. And amid the bitter hard- 



"KING JESUS IS COME" 



53 



ships and the cruel inherited customs of India, 
the lives of love and good- will which the spirit of 
Jesus always inspires, shine out like stars in 




For nearly thirty-five years this fakir has performed acts 

of religious devotion by sitting on his bed of spikes. The 

mark on his forehead and on those of the men about him 
shows that they are worshippers of the god Shiv. 



the night. People wonder at the unselfish- 
ness so evident in the lives of the native Chris- 
tians and the missionaries and are irresistibly 



54 THE WONDERLAND OP INDIA 

drawn to them and through them to the God of 
Love. 

The mela was over, the children were at home, 
and Bob's father was resting, after his busy day. 
^'Tell us a story. Father," they begged. ^^Tell us 
about a girl this time," added Peggy. 

^^Very well," assented Uncle John, "I will tell 
you a true story of a girl named Sita. 

^'Sita was the daughter of a court official, a 
Brahman. She was brought up to eat only the 
finest of foods, to wear beautiful silks, to do no 
work of any kind whatever. Then her father, 
whose pet she had always been, died. Her family 
gave her in marriage, when she was eleven or 
twelve years old, as the fourth wife of an impor- 
tant official. She was his favorite wife and, conse- 
quently, the other wives were jealous of her. They 
did everything they could to make her life miser- 
able. When her child was born they bribed a 
priest to say that if she ever saw her baby it would 
die, so the little boy was taken away from her im- 
mediately after it was born. 

^^Then the older women poisoned the mind of 
her husband. ^What a wicked woman she must 
have been,' they said, 4n some previous life if, 
now, just looking at her boy would cause its 
death!' These women said so much that, after a 
time, Sita's husband banished her to the home of 
his uncle, where she was treated like a servant, 



"KING JESUS IS COME" 55 

beaten till she was black and blue, and subjected 
to many insults. 

^^ At length she ran away. Her path was through 
dense jungles, and at night she climbed high trees 
to be safe from the wild animals — tigers, bears, 
and leopards. Eemember all this time that Sita 
was a girl just like any girl you know, and this 
happened not so very many years ago, either. At 
times she thought she was being pursued, but 
somehow she avoided people and struggled on. 

^'One day she ran into a kindly man who told 
her to go twenty miles farther and she would find 
some strange Isai (Jesus) people who would care 
for her. Two days later she was inquiring at the 
village for the Isai people. She was taken to the 
Christian worker, whose wife took care of her for 
two days while she slept away her exhaustion. 

^'Nobody knew what to do with Sita, but she 
begged hard to stay. 'Never before have I met 
such kindness,' she said. 'The man on the road 
told me that the Isai-log were always kind. I want 
to learn to be an Isai. I will work, I will do any- 
thing you say, only let me stay. ' 

''An elderly Bible woman^ offered to keep her, 
and Sita, who was now about fifteen years old, a 
tall, beautiful girl, started to learn how to read 
and write, how to sew, to knit, to cook, to clean. 



1 "Bible women" are native Indian Christians who go into the 
homes of the people to read the Bible and teach Christian 
religion. 



56 THE WONDERLAND OF INDIA 

Sometimes she would get homesick and sad won- 
dering what had happened to her little baby boy, 
but she stayed on with the missionaries. Later 
she went to a training-school. Today she is a 
Bible woman, going with the missionaries on their 
journeys and helping to tell the story of Jesus. 
Yet always she is praying that some day she may 
go back to her own people and find her little boy 
and tell him and all her old friends the message 
of God's love." 

Bob's father went on to tell the children that 
when Jesus was on earth his greatest success was 
with the poor and despised classes. ' ' The common 
people heard him gladly." So it is with the mis- 
sionaries — in India. Sita was a Brahman girl, 
and there are many like her, who have been won 
by the love of Christ, but by far the largest num- 
ber of the native Christians are from the out- 
castes, the '' untouchables," whom India has al- 
ways so cruelly oppressed. When the Christian 
missionary comes among them, they are treated 
for the first time in their lives like men and 
women and are led to see that through Jesus 
Christ they may even rise to undreamed-of 
heights. At first the story of Christ may mean lit- 
tle to them. They may chatter and grin while 
the missionary talks, and he may go home dis- 
couraged. But the time comes- when, perhaps, 
the headman of a neighboring village charges 
these outcastes with stealing a goat which never 



"KING JESUS IS COME" 57 

existed. Or perhaps the money-lender terrifies 
them with threats. In their fear, they tliink of 
the missionary and go to him with their story. 
Sometimes he is able to help them in one way or 
another. The next time he preaches, they listen. 

'^Let me tell you a story about a man now," 
said Bob's father. ^^In a village of North India 
there lived a little dark man named Ditt. He was 
an outcaste whose business was that of buying and 
selling hides. He heard the gospel from a native 
Christian convert, was baptized, and then returned 
to his regular work, telling his friends of the won- 
derful Saviour whom he had found. His relatives 
jeered at him. ^One of your legs is broken al- 
ready,' they said, referring to his lameness, 'so 
may it be with the other!' But within three 
months, he brought to the mission his wife and 
daughter and two neighbors to be baptized. It 
was a distance of thirty miles, and, in spite of his 
lameness, he walked with them the entire journey. 
As time went on, he brought other neighbors, walk- 
ing with them each time. ' ' 

It was in just this way that there began, within 
recent years, among these outcastes, a wonderful 
mass movement to Christianity. Whole villages 
and districts have sent messengers to the mission- 
aries saying that they have decided to become 
Christians and that they want to be baptized. 
The missionary who receives such a message is 
likely to be perplexed, He has been praying that 



58 THE WONDERLAND OF INDIA 

these people may find the Master, and now they 
are sincere in their decision to become Christians. 
But how little they know about the Christian life ! 
If he baptizes them all, a whole village full of 
them at once, before they have received any in- 
struction in the Christian life, it is almost certain 
that later on many of them will do things that are 
wrong and unchristian. Then outsiders will sneer 
and say, ''It is a fine lot of Christians you have 
there ! ' ' Someone must teach them that they 
must give up worshipping idols, must not lie or 
steal, must not cheat, must be kind and just to 
their neighbors, must live by doing useful work 
from day to day, and must send their children to 
school and go to church every Sunday. 

In the early days of this mass movement the 
missionaries and their native helpers were able to 
take care of all who came, but now such numbers 
are coming that there are no teachers who can be 
sent to them ; and still, more and more they come 
begging. ''Send us a teacher. Sahib, we want to 
become Christians. Everyone considers us worse 
than dogs. Only the Christ you tell us of cares for 
us.^' And the missionary can only say to them, 
"Next year there will be, perhaps, someone whom 
I can send." And to himself, with a sigh, "If only 
the people in America knew, surely they would 
send the help we need. ' ' 

Those who have been baptized from among these 
poor outcastes have shown wonderful faithfulness 



60 THE WONDERLAND OF INDIA 

in their Christian life. They are tempted and 
persecuted and bribed in all sorts of ways, for the 
higher-caste Hindus do not want to lose their 
slaves, which is, in effect, what these outcastes 
really are. But in the great majority of cases the 
new converts are steadfast. Moreover, unlike the 
early Christians of the New Testament, they seem 
fairly bubbling over with a wonderful joy even 
in the midst of persecution. Never before in all 
their lives has anyone loved them. Always they 
have known nothing but fear : fear of wild beasts, 
fear of their oppressors, fear of demons. Now 
they know what love is and are strangely happy. 
In their new found happiness they sing new 
songs. One of these songs of joy or hJiajans, as 
they are called, recently swept over India. Over- 
night it seemed everybody was singing it. It was 
composed by an eight-year-old boy, the son of 
one of these outcastes. 

Rajah Tisu, aiyah! 
Rajah Yisu^ aiyah! 
Shaitan ho jitne he liye. 
Rajah Yis2i, aiyah! 

King Jesus is come! 

King Jesus is come! 

He has come to drive away Satan. 

King Jesus is come! 



"KING JESUS IS COME" 61 

And the last verse is the best : 

King Jesus has come to give me great blessings. 
Everything that is good for me ; 
King Jesus is Come! 

And the very end is a shout of triumph : 

Yisu Masih M Jai! 
Victory to Jesus Christ! 

Surely it is worth while to send missionaries if 
we can so transform lives of misery and selfish- 
ness into lives of love, happiness, and song. 



CHAPTER FIVE 

Schooldays 

^^Want to go to school with me?" asked Bob's 
father one morning. 

^^We'd love to!" the children exclaimed, '"be- 
cause we won't have to study if you are along." 

They put on their big shade hats and soon were 
out on the smooth broad road over which a double 
row of splendid mango trees arched. Their thick 
branches gave grateful shade from the Indian sun 
that was beating down, hot and glaring, on the lit- 
tle mud-fenced fields. In these fields the yellow 
mustard flowers were gay amid the ripening 
wheat. 

As they approached the village next to their 
own, a curious sound of high voices apparently 
chanting in unison caused Bob to look at Peggy, 
and they both laughed. 

^Tearer the tiny one-room schoolhouse the sound 
grew louder and louder. ''That's the way I'd like 
to study," exclaimed Bob; "at the top of my 
lungs ! ' ' 

"Yes," said Peggy, "but not if you had to stay 
in one dark, stuffy room in a mud house. ' ' 

"Some of the schools Father visits are held on 
verandas, though, and some are out under a big 
tree. I'd like that." 

"Oh, see the animals, Uncle John!" shouted 

62 



SCHOOLDAYS 63 

Peggy, jumping up and down. '^It's just like 
Mary's little lamb." 

They had come within sight of the door of the 
little schoolhouse. A goat was browsing about the 
yard, some chickens were scratching beside the 
door, and from a branch of a near-by tree swung a 
mischievous monkey by his tail, peering in through 
the door as well as he could. 

Within the room Peggy noticed that there were 
no desks. There was a table and chair for the 
teacher, but Bob knew that in some village schools 
even these were lacking. There were only one or 
two schoolbooks for the entire class, a few more 
slates and pencils, and a small blackboard. But 
the children of this village were fortunate in hav- 
ing any school at all. 

It is curious to note that while our ancestors 
were still ignorant barbarians, Hindu scholars 
were inventing the wonderfully clever and useful 
method of writing numbers which we now use, — the 
so-called Arabic system having been invented in 
India, — and yet even today in that country only 
one boy in ten can read and write and only one 
girl in a hundred. Although during thousands of 
years Brahman boys have been taught by their 
priests, — principally, it must be confessed, to 
memorize the sacred scriptures, — there were no 
schools of any kind in India for the common peo- 
ple until the early missionaries introduced them. 
Even in those villages where there now are pri- 



64 



THE WONDERLAND OF INDIA 




H. R. Ferger, Lahore, India 

In such mosque schools as this, Mohammedan boys learn to repeat 
verses from the Koran. They also learn a little number-work and 
their alphabet. 



mary schools, not every child can attend, for there 
are the goats to be tended and fodder for the oxen 
to be carried. 

As Bob and Peggy entered the school with their 
father, a little boy came running to the door. He 
shouted, ''Dilawar, Dilawar, the plow is broken! 
You must go to the blacksmith in the next village." 
And Dilawar left for the day. Interruptions like 
this were likely to occur at any time. Under such 
conditions and with a teacher often poorly trained, 
it is no wonder that the children do not make 
great progress. 

On the way home Bob's father told about some 
night-schools, started by missionaries, for men 
and boys who cannot attend day-school. In these 



SCHOOLDAYS 



65 



schools a boy and his father can study together 
without any of the interruptions that arise during 
the day. In a certain village the people asked the 
missionary to start such a school. The mission- 
ary offered to pay for the land if the people would 
build a house. Some gave bamboo for the timbers 
and the roof, others gave their time building the 
mud walls. The mission supplied a good lantern 
and the books. The pupils pay from four to eight 
cents a month. Some fifty-five men and boys at- 
tend. The paths to the school lead through dark 
wood infested by snakes and scorpions. In self- 
protection the pupils come in groups, singing and 
clapping their hands to frighten away the snakes, 
while the missionary teacher takes care to have 
medicine on hand in case anyone should be bitten. 




A little village mission school in North India. 



66 THE WONDERLAND OF INDIA 

The school opens with physical exercises because 
most of the pupils are tired from the day's work 
and need to be thoroughly awakened. Following 
this drill, comes the scripture lesson and then the 
lessons in reading and writing. By the time the 
school is over, it is too late to go home, so the 
men and boys stretch out on the floor of the school- 
room and sleep there until morning. These schools 
continue for only two months each year. A tired, 
sleepy boy studying nights for two months cannot 
learn a great deal, still, one can learn something. 
It is hard for us to realize how much even a few 
months' schooling may mean. 

''How did Tika Eam lose his field?" asked a 
missionary in a certain Indian village. 

"He put his thumb impression on the document 
without knowing what it contained," was the an- 
swer. It was a pitiful story. Tika had had two 
deaths in his family and needed some money. He 
went to the Hindu money-lender and asked for a 
loan of sixty rupees (about $20), which the money- 
lender promised, at the rate of seventy-five 
per cent per year. In the evening the con- 
tract was ready. Of course Tika could neither 
read the contract nor write his name; he had to 
take the money-lender's word for what he was 
signing. So he put his big right thumb first on the 
ink pad and then at the bottom of the writing. 
The money-lender signed his name and had two 
witnesses to sign with him. A few days later 



SCHOOLDAYS 67 

some Hindu men came to Tika's place and began 
looking it over. When Tika asked the reason, 
they replied, '^We have jnst purchased this land 
from the money-lender. '^ And it turned out that 
the document on which the poor farmer had put 
his thumb, in reality said nothing about a loan, but 
stated that Tika Eam sold his farm for four hun- 
dred rupees. The money-lender in turn had sold 
it again. 

There are, in India, however, some very for- 
tunate boys, let us say one boy in a thousand. 
Not only is his father able to keep him in school 
all through the primary grades, but he is granted 
a high school scholarship. He will study English 
and history and science. In time he may even go 
to one of the mission colleges, or he may go to 
the government university. Such a fortunate 
boy will probably some day be found to have be- 
come either a lawyer or a government officer in 
Calcutta or Bombay, a cultivated gentleman, 
speaking English as well or better than many 
educated white people in India. There are no 
finer men anywhere than may be found among the 
college graduates of India. 

Book learning, however, is only one part of edu- 
cation. There are other lessons that Indian boys 
and girls are being taught which are important, 
even as important as reading and writing. They 
are learning, for example, that the plague is 
caused by the bites of fleas, and that the fleas are 



68 



THE WONDERLAND OF INDIA 



carried by rats ; that malaria is caused by a certain 
kind of mosquito; and that the danger of cholera 
may be lessened by putting a little permanganate 
of potash in the village well. Still more import- 
ant is the kind of education which builds character, 
which trains in honesty and helpfulness. 




Athletics at Lucknow Christian College are teaching the students 
fair play, pluck, and teamwork. 

Because there are many splendid lessons which 
are learned better through athletic games than in 
any other way, the missionary teachers have in- 
troduced football, field hockey, and cricket into 
the schools of India. At first the Hindu boys re- 
fused to play. ''What," they said, "get all hot 
doing coolie work and chasing a ball around!'' 



SCHOOLDAYS 69 

And would not the leather ball ^'defile'' them since 
it was made from the skin of a dead cow? Grrad- 
ually, however, the lads in the mission schools 
have got over these prejudices and have learned 
to play games as skilfully as any boys in the world. 
They have a game of their own called atia-patia, 
which is played on a long, narrow field like a foot- 
ball gridiron, except that it is only six yards wide. 
In such games the boys learn not to cheat, but to 
play fair, to be plucky in the face of defeat, and, 
most of all, to cooperate with each other as good 
team workers should. 

It is the same kind of education that the scout 
movement has been giving for years to American 
boys and girls. The first troop of Boy Scouts in 
India was organized a little over fi^Q years ago. 
Today there are over twenty thousand Scouts in 
that country. They are trained, just as our West- 
ern Scouts are trained, in map-drawing, camp- 
cooking, first-aid, and other kinds of useful service. 

Troop Number One of Dehra Dun in northern 
India, went on a camping trip two or three sum- 
mers ago. There were ten boys in the squad, to- 
gether with their Scoutmaster. They started out 
on the trip carrying their own blankets and duffel 
bags. Some of them were high-caste boys who, a 
few months before, would have considered it be- 
neath their dignity to carry anything. They would 
have called it ''coolie work." When they reached 
the camp, there was the same noise and fun as in 



70 THE WONDERLAND OF INDIA 

our American Scout camps. But when the time 
came for tlie ^'eats,'' a difference was to be no- 
ticed. Some of tlie boys were Hindus and some 
were Mohammedans, and the food for each group 
was cooked separately and eaten separately. The 
Scoutmaster wondered how long that arrangement 
would last. ^'Tomorrow morning there will be 
flap-jacks for breakfast/^ he said to himself. 
*' Suppose the call goes up for 'seconds on the flap- 
jacks, ' and there are extra plates full on one table 
and none on the other; what will happen f As 
a matter of fact, on this particular trip, before the 
two weeks were over all the boys were eating to- 
gether at one table. 

A report from another Scoutmaster shows how 
these Indian Scouts are learning the lesson of serv- 
ice to all who are in need of help. This report 
tells what the Scouts did at two melas. ^'At both 
of the melas, our Scouts were out in full force with 
two other troops, nearly one hundred in all. We 
had a tent to which all lost children were brought 
and kept until they were claimed by their parents. 
This tent was gaily decorated with flags and scout 
signs in four languages. We also had arrange- 
ments for supplying water to the thirsty, the 
scouts drawing and carrying it themselves. On 
the last day of the Jhanda Mela, we were on duty 
at the railway station, showing people how to stand 
in line and helping women and old people to buy 
their tickets. To stand in line was a new exper- 



^ 



SCHOOLDAYS 11 

ience for all, but they soon found that they got 
their tickets quicker than in the old method and 
without the usual pushing and fighting.'' 

Another fine example of this kind of education 
is the work of a mission school in Kashmir, under 
the direction of Mr. Tyndale-Biscoe. The Vale of 
Kashmir is called the paradise of India. It is 
situated high among the Himalayas, and the cli- 
mate is delightful. On every side, in the distance, 
may be seen magnificent snow-capped mountain 
peaks. The school is located in the capital city, 
Srinagar, on the Jhelum Eiver. 

Mr. Tyndale-Biscoe went there some thirty years 
ago as headmaster. As the school building was 
situated directly on the banks of the river, he 
undertook to teach the boys to row. When he se- 
cured his first boat, he himself rowed it down the 
river to the school. As he neared the building, ' ^ the 
windows were crowded with straining necks and 
turbaned heads, all grinning and chattering, won- 
dering what new folly the young Sahib had taken 
to now. ' ' When he proposed to the boys that they 
should learn to row, he learned to his astonish- 
ment that ''a Brahman must not touch an English 
oar because on it is a button of leather, and leather 
is made from a dead cow. ' ' Moreover, no Brahman 
must row or paddle a boat because only members 
of the boatman caste do that kind of work. In 
fact, pulling an oar might produce muscle on the 
arms and only boatman coolies and other low- 



72 THE WONDERLAND OF INDIA 

caste folks have muscles. That was thirty years 
ago. Today there is a great race on the river 
every summer, over a two mile course, where 
crews from this and nine other schools compete. 

This is only a small part of the story. When 
Mr. Tyndale-Biscoe first came to Srinagar he 
found at the school some two hundred boys, 
^'smelly and dirty, squatting on the floor with 
mouths open, and fingers messing around their 
faces or holding fire-pots under their long night- 
gown-shaped clothes. Often the only clean spot 
on these Brahman boys was the daub of red paint 
on their foreheads, put there by the priest to show 
that they were worshippers of the god Siva.^' 
With all their dirt, they would not allow their 
teacher to touch them for fear of defiling them 
and would squirm if, by chance, he patted them 
on the back. Not only were they dirty in body, 
they were deceitful, lazy, insolent, and conceited. 
In this new school, however, beside their lessons 
and books, they soon found themselves, not only 
rowing, but also swimming and organized in teams 
for cricket and other games. 

The motto of the school is, ''In All Things Be 
Men.'' They were expected to look every day for 
opportunities of being helpful and kind to other 
people. There surely was need for helpfulness in 
that land. Srinagar, thirty years ago, was ''a 
huge, rabbit-warren sort of place, of 125,000 in- 
habitants. All the streets were crooked, all the 



SCHOOLDAYS 73 

streets were narrow, all the streets were filthy. 
Instead of paving stones, rocks of all shapes and 
sizes had been thrown down indiscriminately, so 
that pedestrians had to pick their way from rock 
to rock, avoiding, if possible, the mud that lay 
between. The garbage was thrown in the streets. 
Had dogs not been created to feed on garbage? 
The character of the people was what you might 
expect in such surroundings. The male sex pushed 
all women and children out of their path, but made 
way for cows and the pariah dogs, as the former 
have horns and the latter, teeth." Not very 
promising surroundings for a school, surely ! But 
this school has educated and trained boys by set- 
ting them to change as far as they could these 
wretched conditions. They have learned to be 
loving, by bringing love into that unloving and 
selfish city. 

About eighteen years ago there was a severe 
epidemic of cholera in Kashmir. The boys from 
the school volunteered to clean up the city. In 
spite of the opposition of the priests, they took 
their picks and shovels, went to the city dumping 
ground and began to dig ditches for drains and 
holes for burying the filth. Day after day they 
worked until they turned that breeding ground of 
pestilence into a park with grass and flowers. 
Another year there was a famine, and the greedy 
merchants charged enormous prices for rice, which 
is the staple food of the people. The boys from 



74 THE WONDERLAND OF INDIA 

the school again volunteered at the call of the 
governor of the province and went np and down 
the river for many miles searching for rice which 
might be bought at a cheaper price and brought 
into the city. The spirit of Christ, as revealed in 
such deeds as these, has completely taken posses- 
sion, of the school. 



Baseball at Lucknow Christian College. Until a few years ago, 
physical exercise was scorned among the caste people of India. 
Now athletic sports and games are entered into as enthusias- 
tically as in the West. 



While these things have been done for the boys 
of India, what sort of chance has little sister 
been given? 

Down to modern times a school for girls was an 



SCHOOLDAYS 75 

unheard of thing. ' ' What ! ' ' exclaimed one Hindu ; 
''Teach my daughter to read! Teach my cow. 
It will learn as easily as any girl will.'' Dr. Duff, 
one of the early missionaries, declared, ''You may 
as well try to climb a wall five hundred miles high 
as get a Brahman to send his girls to school." 
Even today all the customs and ideas of India in 
regard to girls and women are chains to hold them 
back. 

A little girl in India is not welcomed when she 
is born. When her brother came, there was a 
great celebration, with rattles and drums. You 
would have thought it was New Year's Eve in 
America. But no drums were beaten when his 
sister was born, — she was "only a girl." As she 
grows older, it may be that a missionary will try 
to persuade her father to send her to a school for 
girls, just as he is sending her brother. But her 
father will probably say, "What's the use; in a 
few years she will be married. Why bother!" 
Some day, by and by, her mother will call her into 
the house to try on a new dress. It will be prettier 
than any she has ever had before. "Oh, isn't it 
lovely!" she will exclaim. And there will be new 
bracelets of colored glass, and shining silver ban- 
gles. How beautiful! But then will come the 
bad news. Her mother will tell her that the new 
sari is to be her wedding dress. Her father has 
arranged her marriage with the help of the vil- 
lage barber, who has found her a husband. After 



76 THE WONDERLAND OF INDIA 

she is married, it is likely that she will have to be 
a drudge in the household of her husband's 
mother. She will never be permitted to go out on 
the streets, except with her face veiled; she must 
never speak to any men, except members of her 
own family; if she ever goes on a journey, she will 
have to travel in a heavily curtained carriage, 
^'behind the purdah," as they call it. What 
chance will she have to see things or to meet 
people or to grow in mind through new exper- 
iences — to say nothing of going to school ! 

And yet, there are girls in India, today, who are 
getting^ an education, — a fortunate few. Their 
fathers are somehow persuaded to let them go for 
a little while to one of the rare primary schools for 
girls. There they learn to read and to write the 
queer letters of the Indian alphabet, practising 
them on the loose sand of the schoolroom floor. 
For a few months, perhaps a year or two, they 
may go — and those years will be so happy! And 
then will come the message that they must come 
home to be married. Most Hindu girls, even the 
few who are given a little education, are called 
home from school in this way before they are 
twelve. 

It seems a pitiful thing to say, but, in view of 
the customs which the great majority of Hindu 
families still follow strictly, it might be that only 
through some great misfortune would a girl ever 
have an opportunity to go to any school above the 



SCHOOLDAYS 



77 



primary grade. If a terrible famine or pestilence 
should leave her without relatives to care for her, 
some kind missionaries might take her into one of 
their homes and send her to high school or col- 
lege. Or, if her husband should die, she might be 




These Brahman girls, who attend a mission school in South India, 
have many ways of decorating their hair. 



SO ill-treated that she would run away and find 
refuge in some Christian widow's home or school. 
A great many of the girls' schools in India were 
first opened as orphanages that took care of little 
girls who had been left to die during famines and 
who had been picked up and brought to these 
^ 'funny people who cared about girls." Other 



78 THE WONDERLAND OF INDIA 

schools have been opened just for child-widows. 
The life of a widow in India is perhaps the sad- 
dest in all the world. In their ignorance and 
superstition the people suppose that the death of 
the husband is because of his wife's sins. All her 
good clothes and jewelry are snatched away from 
her, her head is shaved, she is dressed in old, 
ragged clothing, and everyone curses and avoids 
her. Her very touch is considered defiling, as 
though she were an outcaste or a pariah. Many a 
poor little child-widow has fled for refuge to the 
Christian missionary. 

However, all who love India rejoice that the 
teaching of the Christian ideals of family life is 
beginning to show its effect even in families where 
the members have not become Christians in name. 
Here and there are courageous Hindu gentlemen 
who see that such cruel treatment of widows is a 
great blot on Indian life and they refuse to follow 
the old customs any longer. 

There is another way, and a wonderful way, in 
which an Indian girl may be given a real chance 
to develop into the beautiful, educated woman 
which she may become; her parents may be won 
to Christ, and all their ideas may be changed. 
There are more and more such Christian homes 
every day, and from them come hundreds of Chris- 
tian girls to the various schools and colleges for 
women which the missionaries have founded. 

The oldest and most famous woman's college in 



SCHOOLDAYS 79 

India was established by Isabella M. Tlioburn, a 
brave American woman who went to India years 
ago to find out if it were really true that you could 
get no Indian girls into a schoolroom. Eight 
among the shops of the Lucknow bazaar she 
opened a little school in a tiny mud house. At 
first some of the Hindus tried to break it up by 
force, and she had to hire guards. Nevertheless, 
the girls continued to come, and the school grew 
until she had to ask for money to buy a larger 
building. So it came about that the school was 
moved to Lai Bagh, a beautiful old residence with 
large grounds. More and more classes were 
added. A high school department was started, 
and then even college classes. It was given the 
name of its founder, and Isabella Thoburn Col- 
lege became the first college for women in all 
Asia. Today, this college has been made the 
women's department in the great government uni- 
versity at Lucknow. 

The students in the few colleges and schools that 
there are for girls in India have wonderfully good 
times. They have learned, for example, to play 
basketball. At first they could not grasp the idea. 
When the center was knocked down in the scrim- 
mage, she flew into a rage. After the game, the 
losing team cried like babies. But gradually they 
learned to take hard knocks and laugh at them and 
to play fair. Dramatics they find great fun too. 
The Hindu people seem to have a natural talent 



80 



THE WONDERLAND OF INDIA 



for acting. They love to turn Bible stories and 
old Hindu tales into plays and act them out. Be- 
side their study and their play these girls learn 
not to cheat, to be loyal to their school, and always 
to be kind. 




Girl Guides of the Isabella Thoburn High School, Lucknow, are 
learning a new spirit of helpfulness and strength to carry back 
to their home villages. 

A group of girls wrote this letter of apology 
to their teacher: 

Dear Miss : 

We are the Math students who made you so much 
trouble this morning, and we feel very sorry. We ought 
to have told you before, but we did not, so please excuse 
us for the fault we committed and realize now. Our 
love to you. 

Fifth Form Math Girls 



SCHOOLDAYS 81 

It is not strange that when such girls as these go 
back to their own villages, they bring a new spirit 
into their homes. One girl wrote to her teacher 
during the summer vacation: "We have given our 
mother a month's holiday. All she needs to do is 
to go to the bazaar and buy supplies. My sister 
and I do all the rest.'' Another girl, named 
Jewel, begged the use of the sewing-machine in 
the mission bungalow and for days before Christ- 
mas, with her bare feet on the treadle, kept the 
wheels whirling, making presents for all her many 
little brothers and sisters. 

Of all who have helped the girls and women of 
India to a better chance in life, none have done 
more or served their cause more faithfully and 
heroically than one of India's own daughters, the 
famous Pandita Eamabai, whose death on April 
5, 1922, was mourned all over the world. Eama- 
bai 's father, a Brahman, was an extraordinary 
man who, in the face of all the traditions of his 
people, believed in educating women. He took his 
little girl-wife away from his relatives into the 
forest, where he built a hut and where they lived 
and studied together. When their little daughter 
Eamabai was old enough, she also studied with her 
father and mother, and they were all very happy. 
But after a time, a terrible famine came, in 
which Eamabai lost both her father and her 
mother. She never forgot their life together, how- 
ever, or her father's ideas about giving women an 



82 THE WONDERLAND OF INDIA 

equal chance. This impression was deepened by 
an event which she saw when she was a little girl 
of eight. She was playing in the courtyard of the 
house where her father's people lived in the town 
of Muttra. In the same yard a child-wife was sit- 
ting at her spinning-wheel. In those days nearly 
all the clothing in India was made of home- spun 
cotton. Factory-made cloth was rarely seen. 
Presently the little wife was called for a moment 
into the house and left her pile of cotton lying by 
the wheel. This was too great a temptation to the 
monkeys that were chattering on the roof of the 
house. One of them leaped down, snatched up the 
cotton, and disappeared. The loss was a mere 
trifle, but the mother-in-law, a hard, cruel woman, 
would not believe the story about the monkeys 
and, not only beat the child cruelly, but complained 
to the husband about the wasteful, deceitful crea- 
ture he had brought into the house. He too be- 
came enraged and whipped the friendless, help- 
less little one. Ramabai never forgot her pitiful 
cries. 

As she grew older, Eamabai continued to study, 
until, in later years, the fame of her learning had 
so spread that she was able to support herself by 
lecturing. The proud Brahmans were amazed to 
hear her quote the ancient writings. They called 
her '^Pandita,'' or learned, a title no woman had 
been allowed to bear. As soon as possible, she 
tried to carry out her father's ideas. She went to 



SCHOOLDAYS 83 

England to study the schools there in the hope of 
doing something for the widows of her own coun- 
try. While in England, she came to believe in 
Christ. Eeturning to India, she opened a home 
for high-caste Hindu widows. Her beautiful kind- 
ness and love soon won their hearts. 

A little later a terrible famine broke out in Cen- 
tral India, and Ramabai hurried to the famine dis- 
trict and brought back three hundred starving 
girls. She placed them on a little farm which she 
had bought and taught them, not only how to do 
all kinds of work, but also to read and write. This 
home is called MuMi, or Salvation, and over the 
entrance are the words in Marathi, ^'Praise the 
Lord.'' From it have gone out hundreds of en- 
lightened Christian women who are helping to 
make a new India. Those who marry and have 
families do not quickly become just ignorant old 
women, but wise loving mothers, like our own dear 
mothers in America. 

How quickly India would be changed and made 
Christlike if only there were, not hundreds, but 
hundreds of thousands of such mothers, to love 
and comfort and train their boys and girls, and of 
fathers trained, in such schools as Tyndale-Bis- 
coe's at Srinagar, to be strong and courageous 
Christian gentlemen. 



CHAPTER SIX 

Feeding the Hungry 

^' Peggy/' said Uncle John, ^'if you had ^ve 
cents a day to spend on food, what would you 
buy?'' 

^'Why — why — ," said Peggy, ^'I think I'd buy 
an apple. ' ' 

^'And would that satisfy you until the next 
day?" 

'^Oh, I'd want Mother to give me some cereal 
for breakfast, and some bread and jam, at least, 
for lunch, and some meat and potatoes for dinner." 

''That is what the boys and girls of India must 
Svant' too, but what most of them get is the equi- 
valent of the apple you mentioned. ' ' 

"They're hungry about all the time, aren't 
they?" asked Bob. 

''Yes," was the reply, "and although the 'wealth 
of India' has been a proverb since long before the 
time of Solomon, most of the common people live, 
even to-day, on a mere pittance." 

Bob's father then went on to tell Bob and Peggy 
that poverty in India grows out of a number of 
causes. One is, that her people are not trained in 
the best ways of working. For this reason mis- 
sionaries have started schools where their pupils 
can learn trades. 

At Baranagar, a town five miles north of Cal- 

84 



FEEDING THE HUNGRY 85 

cutta, there were eighteen boys in an orphanage, 
poor waifs who had been rescued from death dur- 
ing one of India's famines. There was very little 
money to care for them, and the woman mission- 
ary in charge began to wonder, '^Is there no way 
in which the boys can work and earn money to help 
care for themselves !'' Then she thought of Am- 
rito, a clever mechanic in that town. 

Amrito's father had been a clerk. Amrito was 
to have been a clerk also, but after his father's 
death, his friends grew tired of paying for his 
education and decided to make him an apprentice 
to an engraver in a gun factory. Amrito was 
heartbroken at first, but finally concluded to make 
the best of it. He became a skilled workman and 
stayed in the factory eleven years. By the end of 
that time he was earning unusually high wages for 
an Indian. 

When Miss Evans, the missionary at the or- 
phanage, asked Amrito if he could not teach her 
boys some trade, he went home and thought and 
prayed over the matter. It would mean a good 
deal of self-sacrifice. But he saw a chance to do 
a great service, even greater perhaps than the 
missionary had dreamed. 

The next day he said to Miss Evans, ** Could 
you trust me to begin a school for boysf I will 
take no pay." The result was that the school was 
started at once. Amrito gave up his good position 
in the factory and even contributed jewelry which 



86 THE WONDERLAND OF INDIA 

was sold for what it would bring. Friends gave 
land and tools. The boys gradually made other 
tools for themselves. The buildings were so small 
that each time they were given a new piece of 
machinery, they had to build an addition in order 
to make room for it. All the old boxes that came 
in were taken by the boys and made into shelves 
and drawers and benches. 

Little by little the school has grown, until it has 
made a splendid name for itself in all that part of 
India. The boys work at their machines and learn 
mechanical trades by day, and in the evening have 
lessons in reading, writing, and arithmetic. The 
articles they make are sold, and from the proceeds 
the boys are paid, just like other apprentices. 
They themselves wrote this little school song about 
their work : 

The soldiers in Mespot have often used oil 
Kept in bottles of brass supplied by our toil. 
Many muzzle ]3rotectors and cartridge belt studs 
Have gone from our workshop to their fighting squads. 
For Assam tea gardens weVe sifters and driers; 
For jute mills, cop spindles and brass gills and fliers; 
For steamers, for trains, and for warehouses, locks; 
For municipal hydrants the best water-cocks. 
In exalted position our work may be seen, 
For Government House a good patron has been. 
Brass handles for drawer chests and casters for chairs. 
And eyes for the brass rods on vice-regal stairs. 

After a few years the boys leave the school and 
go into factories in Calcutta and elsewhere, re- 



FEEDING THE HUNGRY 87 

ceiving good wages. The people of Baranagar no 
longer say, ''Only dunces go to a school where 
they learn to work with their hands." The boys 
learn, not only to do honest work, but to be square 
in all business dealings and to remember the 
school's mottoes: ''God is Almighty," and "Pray 
devoutly, labor stoutly." It is a great work that 
Amrito has accomplished in Baranagar. Other 
schools like his have since been started by mis- 
sionaries, where both boys and girls can learn 
trades and where they can learn to be proud of 
good work of any kind. 

But there are comparatively few factories in 
India, as compared with America, where men and 
boys can find employment. With her rich soil and 
warm climate, India will always be chiefly a land 
of farms. It is even more important to teach her 
people how to be skilful farmers than to establish 
schools for training brass and iron workers. For 
years missionaries have tried to think of ways to 
help the farmers raise larger crops in order that 
not so many people would have to go to bed hungry 
every night. 

In one district where throngs of despised out- 
castes, living in the deepest poverty were beg- 
ging the mission to receive them as Christians, 
the missionaries found a unique opportunity to 
help the people. These outcastes kept chickens — 
poor, weak, unprofitable fowls they were — but still 
the people knew something about the care of poul- 



88 



THE WONDERLAND OP INDIA 



try, and this was enough to furnish the rude be- 
ginnings of a new enterprise. Mr. Arthur E. 
Slater, one of the young missionaries who had a 
vision of wliat might be achieved by tliese humble 
folk if they were taught a respectable trade, came 




Mr. Slater and his native helpers find "missionaries in feathers" 
good assistants in teaching the people of India how to make 
better livings. 

to Canada and took a thorough course in poultry 
culture at an agricultural college. Then he went 
back to the little town of Etah, miles from a rail- 
road, and began to show the people how to breed 
better fowls and how to increase the production of 
eggs. He imported some fine American chickens, 
crossed them with the native breeds, and sold set- 
tings of eggs to the people. 



FEEDING THE HUNGRY 89 

Soon these wonderful chickens began to be the 
talk of the villages. The people could scarcely 
believe their eyes when they saw how many eggs 
were being gathered. Mr. Slater also showed them 
how to avoid being cheated by the tricky egg mer- 
chants who had been defrauding them, and he 
opened up a better market for the produce. Every 
year he receives from friends in America new 
shipments of these ^'missionaries in feathers," as 
he calls his imported chickens. Today the people 
of that district, who, in former years, were miser- 
able, filthy, and hopeless, are becoming a clean, 
well-fed, and happy community. They have their 
own schools and their own church, which they 
themselves largely support. 

With this same purpose of helping the people 
to get more out of their farms, agricultural schools 
and experiment stations have been started by 
many missions. One of the most famous of these 
is the Allahabad Agricultural Institute which was 
founded as a result of the vision and energy of 
Mr. Sam Higginbottom. 

The land that was bought for the farm on which 
the Institute is located was considered very poor. 
Mr. Higginbottom did not want people to say: 
*'0h, you had good land! Anybody could raise 
fine crops on such land!" They could never say 
this about the Jumna Farm. In fact, at first, the 
neighboring farmers said just the opposite. They 
laughed, ''You'll never get anywhere with that 



90 THE WONDERLAND OF INDIA 

land." It was infested with a kind of quack grass 
that spreads from the roots as well as through 
seed. The native plows only cut through the roots 
of the grass, and each small fragment begins at 
once to send out new shoots. The result is that in 
the course of a few years such a field becomes so 
completely matted with this wiry grass that it is 
almost a hopeless task to try to redeem it. But 
Mr. Higginbottom began his work by importing 
some fine American plows which would turn a fur- 
row ten inches deep. With these he plowed his 
land, turning the quack grass sods completely over 
and exposing their roots to the sun. That very 
first year, as the result of the deep plowing, and in 
spite of a dry season, his crops were better than 
those raised even in favorable years in that part 
of the country. 

Everybody marvelled. Young farmer lads came 
to the mission and said, ''Teach us the new ways." 
There was little money to care for them, and no 
buildings where they could live or where classes 
could meet. A school was started, nevertheless. 
In dry weather the boys slept under the trees. 
When it rained, they took shelter in the machinery 
shed. By-and-by more money came in from 
friends in America, buildings were erected, and 
the school grew. The boys are taught how to use 
better fertilizers, how to make betters breeds of 
cattle, and how to build silos for preserving green 
fodder for the cattle through the long dry season. 



FEEDING THE HUNGRY 



91 



A very important tiling tliey learn is how to use 
labor-saving macliinery. Sometimes there are 
amusing difficulties. The ordinary Indian plow 
is only a curved piece of wood with a small iron 
point A man has to walk fifty miles in plowing 




n li Ferrjer, Lahore, India 
Working over the hard-baked "liidian sod with an old-time 
^ wooden plow. 

an acre, and then he has only scratched the sur- 
face of the soil. But when Mr. Higginhottom 
tried to introduce our American plows, he found 
that Indian farmers could not use them. The 
trouble was that with these large plows they could 
not reach to twist the tails of the oxen, who are 
accustomed to being guided in this manner. Now, 
however, a new plow is being made especially tor 
Indian use, which, though large enough to turn a 
deep furrow, is small enough and short enough 
for the farmer to reach forward and give the tails 
of his oxen the proper twist. 



92 THE WONDERLAND OF INDIA 

Giving a farmer an agricultural education is not 
always enough, however, to lift him out of poverty 
and misery. A certain farmer who lived near 
Jumna Mission Farm was bright enough and 
energetic enough to watch the methods used by 
Mr. Higginbottom's students and, to some extent, 
copy them. His crops were greatly increased, and 
he was very happy. But the very next year his 
landlord doubled the rent of his little field. 
Imagine the black cloud of hopelessness which set- 
tled down on that poor fellow's heart, and the 
hearts of all his neighbors! '^What is the use of 
working hard f ' ' they asked each other. ^ ' Of what 
use to us are these fine new schemes! The more 
rice and wheat we raise, the more we must pay to 
the rich landowner. We might as well give up 
our hopes. It is the will of the gods that we shall 
always live in wretchedness." 

The great majority of Indian farmers rent their 
farms and are in bondage to these rich landowners, 
who take from them in rent every cent they pos- 
sibly can. These men are often money-lenders as 
well as landlords. Seventy-five per cent a year is 
not an uncommonly high rate of interest for them 
to charge. It is money wrung from the necessities 
of the poor. The cruel game is played in this way : 
A farmer finds himself in desperate need of 
money. Perhaps there was a famine the preced- 
ing year, and now the planting season has come 
again and he has no seed to sow in his fields ; or 



FEEDING THE HUNGRY 93 

perhaps his daughter is nearly twelve years old 
and unless she is married within a year, the fam- 
ily, according to their ideas, will be disgraced. 
And if she is married, a large sum of money, called 
dowry, must be paid to the husband's family. So, 
for one reason or another, the man is driven to the 
money-lender. He is given the money, but from 
that time on, month after month, year after year, 
he must shoulder the burden of those enormous 
interest payments. Year after year he is threat- 
ened, insulted, cursed, and cheated. Can anyone 
blame him if he sinks back into a life of laziness 
and dirt I 

So, along with the new training in the best 
methods of farming, it became necessary for some- 
one to help these farmers of India to beat off the 
greedy men. Help has been brought to thousands 
of such people through a plan which has been 
worked out chiefly by the Young Men's Christian 
Association of India. Into a little village there 
will come a Y. M. C. A. Eural Secretary, who pro- 
poses to its leading men the organization of a co- 
operative credit bank. Each farmer is to deposit 
a rupee or two, and then, in case of need, he can 
borrow a small sum at a fair rate of interest, say 
nine and one-half to fifteen per cent, instead of 
seventy-five per cent. There is a Christian Cen- 
tral Cooperative Bank in the city of Madras, with 
a capital amounting to more than $25,000 from 
which these little village branches can borrow for 



94 THE WONDEKLAND OF INDIA 

their members. Each member, however, has a 
proportionate share of responsibility for the debts 
of his branch. 

It is not easy to organize these societies. The 
oppressed and discouraged people have always 
been cheated, and they have learned to cheat in 
turn. They know very little of trust or trust- 
worthiness. Most of them cannot read or write. 
"Who will keep the bank's accounts? The secre- 
tary has to train the people in the very simplest 
matters. He must put the rules of the bank into 
the form of easily memorized verse or jingle. 
He must collect interest payments when they fall 
due, and teach the people the importance of 
promptness and reliability in business dealings. 
He must find someone sufficiently intelligent and 
educated to understand the rudiments of book- 
keeping, and, as soon as possible, make him re- 
sponsible for the banks' funds. All this takes 
time. But in spite of these difficulties, there are 
now more than two hundred and forty of these 
Cooperative Credit Societies, with a membership 
of more than six thousand, and a working capital 
of more than 150,000 rupees, or about $50,000, 
much of which has been subscribed in small sums 
by the members themselves. It is significant of 
the careful supervision and planning that not one 
penny of all the loans which have been made has 
been lost. Every one has been paid back at the 
proper time. 



FEEDING THE HUNGRY 95 

A¥liat lias been accomplished is truly wonderful. 
Take, for example, the story of Jokhan Singh, of 
the village of Chittanni, in North India. This fine 
old gentleman was a member of the warrior caste 
and, although he could neither read nor write, he 
was keen enough of wit to catch by mental arithme- 
tic even a ^ve cent overcharge in an interest pay- 
ment. When the cooperative bank was organized 
in Chittanni, Jokhan Singh had been owing five 
hundred rupees to the money-lender for ten years. 
He had paid many times this amount in interest 
and still was not free of the burden. He no longer 
expected ever to be free. He fully expected that 
he would die in debt and pass on the burden to his 
children. The first thing the new bank did, was to 
pay off these five hundred rupees to the village 
lender, who did not want the matter settled so 
easily, and who had to be coaxed and threatened 
before he would consent. Within a year or two, 
Jokhan Singh had repaid the full amount to the 
cooperative bank and was a free man again. A 
little later, when his house burned down, he re- 
built with the help of a new loan, and the new 
house was larger and better than the old one. 

Another story is told by a Y. M. C. A. secretary. 
^*A poor man came to me one day, very glad and 
joyful. ^Do you know what has happened! All 
my debts have been paid. I sold one of my farm 
animals and got ninty rupees and cleared off all 
my debts. See, here is my receipt.' 



96 THE WONDERLAND OF INDIA 

*'I read the receipt once, twice, and the third 
time. ' My friend, what is this ! ' I said. ^ This re- 
ceipt says nothing about the debt having been 
paid. It says you still owe the money-lender one 
hundred and fifty rupees.' The old man, more 
than sixty years old, began to weep like a baby. 
He could not stand the disappointment and went 
insane. 

*'His son, who was thirty years old, showed me 
a dagger. ' I am going to kill that money-lender, ' 
he said. ^Whether we live or die, it matters not. 
Look at my father!' I went to the money-lender 
and asked the old rat to wipe off the debt. His 
reply was, ^He owes me one hundred and fifty 
rupees. If he comes to kill me, I have plenty of 
men to handle him.' 

^'I finally got the money-lender to reduce the 
debt to one hundred rupees. That was the best I 
could do. Then we started a cooperative bank. 
Now the whole debt is paid, and the man is free." 

Wherever these banks have been organized, 
similar stories are told : stories of men who have 
been helped to buy seed or tools, or who have been 
enabled to buy their own farms instead of paying 
extortionate rents to wealthy landowners. By 
such everyday helpfulness as this, the disciples of 
Jesus in India today are trying to carry out the 
spirit of his words when He said that He came to 
preach deliverance to captives and the opening 
of the prison-house to them that are bound. 



CHAPTER SEVEN 

Adventijkes in Healing 

HOSPITAL FOR COWS. So reads a sign on a 
gateway in Karachi. For hundreds of years, in all 
parts of India, men and women, to prove them- 
selves pious Hindus, have built and supported 
hospitals for all sorts of animals. During one 
famine, when thousands of human beings starved 
to death and when only the very rich were not 
hungry all the time, twenty thousand rats were fed 
by Jain priests. These Jains are one sect of 
Hindus who make it their chief rule not to kill an 
animal or insect, however small. A Jain priest 
always carries a little broom with which to sweep 
his path before him lest he step on some living 
creature and kill it. 

Hospitals for cows, hospitals for rats, but few 
hospitals where a sick man or child could be taken 
and cared for and made well again! And there 
are so many sick people in India. Sometimes it 
seems as if all India were sick. The deaf, the 
blind, the crippled, the lepers, wander everywhere. 
Instead of trying to do something for them, peo- 
ple have always shrugged their shoulders and 
said, '^It is the will of the gods. If the gods have 
made little Sita blind, what can be done!'' Yet 
often a very slight operation would restore Sita's 
sight. Most of the blindness is preventable. If 

97 



9S THE WONDERLAND OP INDIA 

the mothers would only keep their little babies 
clean and not allow flies to settle continually on 
their faces, there would be no ''sore eyes," of the 
kind which makes most of the blindness. 

Do they have no doctors'? Yes, doctors of a 
sort. An amusing story is told ^ of a poor little 
wife who came to a mission hospital asking for 
medicine for her husband who was sick with the 
influenza. The directions on the bottle said, 
' ^ Shake well before using. ' ' So she took the medi- 
cine home and shook — her poor sick husband, be- 
fore every dose. ''Why," she said, "I supposed 
that was what it meant. Our village doctors al- 
ways shake sick people to drive the demons out." 
That is a good example of their doctors' methods. 
If a little girl has a fever, a dreadful clatter with 
tin pans is prescribed to scare away the demons, 
and her temple is burned with a red-hot poker to 
let the fever demon out. Being sick in India does 
not mean a quiet, restful room, with a wise, skil- 
ful doctor, and mother watching over you and 
making dainty things for you to eat; it means 
dreadful torture. 

To help these pitiful ones, the medical mission- 
aries have come — the first, more than a hundred 
years ago — with their medicines, their surgical in- 
struments, and their scientific knowledge. Hun- 
dreds of hospitals have been built, and a countless 
multitude of sick and despairing sufferers have 

1 Told by Miss Applegarth. 



ADVENTURES IN HEALING 



99 



been healed. And because their patients were al- 
wa3^s asking why the missionaries should care 
Y/hcn they were sick, and why they should work 
so hard to help the people of a foreign land, this 
has given the missionary doctor a chance to tell 







A leper church — the men on one side and the women on the other 
— giving thanks for having found the God of Love. 

them about the Christ who healed the sick, cured 
the lepers, and made the blind to see, and who still 
fills the hearts of his followers with compassion 
for all their human brothers who are in need. 
Many who have come to the doctor for medicine 
for the body have found also a wonderful medi- 
cine for the soul. 

Many exciting stories could be told about the 



100 THE WONDERLAND OF INDIA 

lives of medical missionaries in India. For ex- 
ample, the story of Dr. PennelPs work for twenty 
years among the wild tribes on the northwestern 
border of India, just across from Afghanistan, 
sounds like an adventure story, and every word of 
it is true. 

The Afghans, many of whom live on the Indian 
side of the border, claim to have been descended 
from the lost tribes of Israel and are fanatical 
Moslems. Many of them are cruel, treacherous, 
and dishonest. Yet they are also very hospitable 
and loyal to a friend. Their priests, who are 
called Mullahs, are usually the only people who 
can read and write, and they have much influence 
with the people. They are very bitter against 
Christianity, and consequently cause the mission- 
aries much trouble. Christians among the Af- 
ghans, Pathans, and the Moslem tribes are always 
in danger. There are men called ghazis who take 
a vow to kill at least one ^^ unbeliever" before they 
die. The Mullahs teach them that by so doing 
they will wipe away all their sins and go to the 
highest heaven in the life beyond. 

Blood feuds among themselves are also very 
common. In British territory, of course, they are 
afraid of the law, and open shooting is not com- 
mon; but across the border, few Afghans dare to 
go out of their houses without their rifles ready 
for use. They have in their houses peep holes to 
shoot through rather than windows to see through. 



ADVENTURES IN HEALlNa 101 

Whole families are often wiped out in these feuds. 
In Dr. Pennell's hospital patients frequently asked 
to be put in wards away from the windows, for 
fear some enemy would fire at them. One man 
who had been blinded by his enemies came to Dr. 
Pennell begging, ' ' Sahib, give me my sight long 
enough to go and shoot my enemy, then I shall be 
satisfied to be blind all the rest of my life." 

To live as a Christian missionary among such 
vindictive, cruel people surely required much 
courage. Nevertheless, Dr. Pennell went quietly 
ahead with his plans and opened a small hospital 
at Bannu, which is a small town about twenty 
miles from the border of Afghanistan. From that 
hospital as a center, he traveled through all that 
region. He learned to speak the native language 
perfectly and dressed in the native costume, so 
that frequently he was taken for an Afghan. He 
was attacked many times for preaching Christ. 
The Mullahs ordered their people not to listen to 
him or even to go to him for medicine. Once a 
bandit boasted that he would kill the Sahib the 
next time he made a certain trip. When Dr. Pen- 
nell heard this, he made the trip alone and un- 
armed and slept by the roadside going and com- 
ing. The bandit, for some reason, did not dare to 
carry out his threat. 

In traveling. Dr. Pennell often placed himself 
under the protection of the chief man of the vil- 
lage where he had to pass the night. Once in an 



102 THE WONDERLAND OF INDIA 

outlaw village, the chief set a guard of six armed 
men around his bed. The doctor was so tired that 
he dropped into a sound sleep almost instantly. 
Some of the fanatical Moslems in the guard wanted 
to kill him during the night. But the others re- 
fused, saying, ''See, he has trusted himself en- 
tirely to our protection; see how soundly he is 
sleeping. No harm must be done to him in our 
village." After so many escapes, a tale began to 
spread that an angel was protecting the "Daktar 
Sahib," and that it would be useless to try to in- 
jure him. 

The Pathans have their own medical men whom 
they called "hakims." Their favorite method of 
treating the sick is to take a piece of cloth, roll it 
into a hard wad about the size of a twenty-five 
cent piece, soak it in oil, and set it on fire on the 
part that hurts. On one man Dr. Pennell counted 
fifty scars from such treatments. In contrast with 
these cruel, ignorant men. Dr. Pennell must truly 
have seemed like the Lord Jesus, come to earth 
again, for he was constantly performing what 
seemed to the people miracles of healing. 

One class of cases which were common in Dr. 
Pennell 's practice were as funny as they were 
pathetic. Among the Afghans, a favorite method 
of revenge is to cut off the nose of one's enemy. 
So the ''Daktar Sahib" was often called on to 
treat an amputated nose. Sometimes he was able 
to put on an artificial nose such as could be ob- 



ADVENTURES IN HEALING 103 

tained from England, and so restore the person's 
looks as well as heal the wound. In one case, by 
mistake, a white nose was sent from England in- 
stead of a brown one. Dr. Pennell stained it wal- 
nut and the man started home quite satisfied, but 
on the way he was caught in the rain, and in his 
village was greeted with howls of laughter. His 
new nose was streaky. 

Besides all his medical work, the doctor opened 
a school for boys, in which he taught several 
classes. In this way he got in touch with the 
growing lads of the city and became in time the 
best known man in and around Bannu. During his 
last illness, crowds gathered around his house, 
waiting anxiously for news. Their grief at his 
death was intense. They said of him at the time, 
and some spxy yet, ^^He is not dead. Our Daktar 
Sahib could not die. lie lives." 

Men doctors, however, even such men as Dr. 
Pennell, are able to do practically nothing to help 
the women and girls of India. Sometimes very 
little baby girls or wrinkled old women may be 
brought to a doctor, but most Indian women would 
rather die than be cared for by a man doctor. 
Consequently, when the first woman doctor, Miss 
Clara Swain, went to India, over fifty years ago, 
she found a country where the women had never 
had a doctor. At first the people were very sus- 
picious and skeptical. ''What could a woman 
J^now anyhow ! ' ' they said. But before very long 



104 THE WONDERLAND OF INDIA 

there were so many calls for her that a hospital 
became necessary. 

The land that Dr. Swain wanted for her hospi- 
tal belonged to a native prince. She called on him 
to ask if he would either sell or lease it to the mis- 
sion. To her great pleasure, she was cordially re- 
ceived and the land was given to her outright. 
Later, Dr. Swain was asked to become court phy- 
sician to the favorite wife of an important native 
prince, or Maharajah. For years she lived in this 
native state where, before her time, no Christians 
had dared to go, and she founded schools as well 
as hospitals for the people. 

Everywhere women missionary doctors have 
had the same experience. At first people are 
suspicious of them, and sometimes it seems as 
though all doors would be closed to them. Usually 
their first opportunities are among the poorest 
outcastes who have nothing to lose through being 
touched by the strange Miss Sahibs who think they 
know as much as men, who go around with their 
faces uncovered, who touch all sorts of people, and 
handle sores and other ugly ailments. Then after 
a time they are invited into the homes of higher- 
caste people and are asked to treat some woman 
who has never stepped outside of her own home 
without a heavy veil which covers her from head 
to toe. No man doctor would ever be allowed to 
visit a sick woman or child inside one of these 
high-caste homes. The woman might die, but that 



ADVENTURES IN HEALING 105 

would make no difference, it is against the custom 
to allow any strange man to enter the home and 
see the ladies of the house. 

A certain very wealthy prince who supported 
schools and had a hospital in his capital city once 
sent for a woman missionary doctor to treat his 
sick wife and his little son who was the pride of 
the family. The doctor was in England on her 
vacation. There was no other woman doctor 
within reach, although the prince wired desper- 
ately to all the nearest large cities. He finally 
cabled to England and the doctor took the first 
boat out, making the trip in three weeks. When 
she arrived, the baby boy, the heir to the little 
kingdom, had died. The mother finally recovered. 

In South India there is a well-known woman 
doctor who comes from a very old and famous mis- 
sionary family. Her grandfather was the first 
medical missionary to India. All of his sons be- 
came missionaries, three of them being doctors, 
and in all, thirty-one of his descendents have 
worked in India, giving a total of eight hundred 
years of service to his people. Miss Ida Scud- 
der's father was one of these doctor sons, with a 
hospital and big practice in South India. This 
daughter of his, however, decided that she would 
never, never, be a medical missionary. When she 
had finished her college course in America, she 
went out to India for a short visit to her family, 
planning, however, to return to America. WhiL 



106 THE WONDERLAND OF INDIA 

she was in India, her father was called out of the 
city, and before he returned, word came that the 
wife of one of the Christians was very sick, and 
would not the Miss Sahib, who had such a wonder- 
ful education, come and help! But Miss Scudder 
did not know how to help. Later came a message 
from a friendly Brahman, that his favorite daugh- 
ter was sick. Would not the Miss Sahib come and 
help 1 Again she could do nothing. Soon the sick 
girPs father himself came begging her to come and 
cure his daughter. He could not understand how 
it was that she, with her college education, the 
daughter of such a wonderful doctor, should know 
nothing about the medical science. He begged and 
pleaded, but Miss Scudder could only try to ex- 
plain that she never had any experience in such 
cases and would be worse than useless. 

The next day the little Brahman girl was dead, 
and the Christian wife was dying. These two 
calls which she could not answer, these two failures 
to help the women of India, so weighed upon her 
heart that Ida Scudder changed all her plans, went 
back to America to study medicine, and today she 
is giving her life to healing the sick among the 
women and children of India. 

Dr. Scudder has charge of a large hospital in 
Vellore, the city where the ^^ Scudder" name has 
been loved for one hundred years. Besides her 
work in the hospital, she has a Ford automobile 
which is fitted up with medical supplies, Sunday- 



AiDVENTURES IN HEALING 107 

school picture rolls, and Bibles. With this com-' 
bination traveling drug-store and Sunday-school, 
she, with an assistant and a native Bible woman, 
travels all over the surrounding region, giving out 
medicines to the sick and telling Bible stories. 

A day with Dr. Scudder on one of these trips 
would be something any of us would remember 
all of our lives. That Ford is a miracle of careful 
and ingenious packing. On the step, is tied a box 
full of bottles of medicine packed in cotton. On 
top of the box is a bag of surgical instruments. 
Hanging on the glass windshield are more instru- 
ments and also small boxes containing medicines 
most likely to be needed. Stowed away under the 
seats are Bibles and Testaments, Bible picture 
rolls, great piles of picture post-cards, and a lunch 
box. They start out at about half-past eight in 
the morning. The doctor drives the car herself. 
Besides her sits Granamal, who makes up the pre- 
scriptions, and on the back seat sits Penina, the 
Bible woman. Pretty soon they come to a village 
and draw up under the shade of a banyan tree. 
Here is a little crowd waiting for them: a man 
with an abscess in the jaw, another man with a 
running ear, and other cases too numerous to de- 
describe. The doctor writes her prescriptions on 
the margins of picture post-cards which her friends 
send her from America. The patient takes the 
card around to Granamal's little drug-store on the 
car step and gets his bottle of medicine or his half 



108 THE WONDERLAND OF INDIA 

coconut sliell filled with ointment or a powder in a 
cotton bag. 

While the doctor has been treating the sick, 
Penina, too, has been busy. The moment the car 
stops, out she jumps with her picture rolls and 
Bibles, and soon she has a little audience of pa- 
tients and their friends who look admiringly at the 
pictures and listen eagerly to the story of the 
loving Christ who healed the sick and cleansed the 
lepers. 

At last, when all the sores have been dressed 
and all the aches and pains investigated and pre- 
scribed for, Penina finishes her preaching, they 
pack up the drug-store, and crank up the car. It 
is good-by for this time, and they are otf down the 
road to the next village. So it goes all day long. 
Here is a woman with a tooth to be pulled, there is 
a poor fellow in the last stages of consumption, 
here is an old man with rheumatism, and every- 
where there are children with sore eyes. Prob- 
ably the doctor has, with her syringe, saved thou- 
sands of children from going blind. One day, 
going home, she came upon a string of people 
across the road determined to stop the car. She 
pulled up and asked what was the matter. It 
seemed that early that morning when she passed 
through that village, she had treated a little girl's 
eyes in the usual way, and the father, amazed at 
the immediate relief and improvement, had spent 
the day telling his neighbors about it, and collect- 



110 THE WONDERLAND OF INDIA 

ing- children to be treated in the same way. Here 
were seventeen of them, all with sore eyes. 

By-and-by the day's work; draws to a close. 
The doctor has treated nearly two hundred pa- 
tients. The car is decked with flowers — the chil- 
dren have been bringing them all day, in bunches, 
in strings, in garlands. The sun is setting now. 
Soon the front and tail lights are lighted and they 
start back to Vellore. Has it not been a wonderful 
day? And is it not a wonderful life which this 
great-souled, brilliant-minded woman is leading? 

Not only is she treating thousands of patients 
herself; she is training other women to be her 
helpers and to take her place when she is gone. 
Once when Dr. Scudder was in this country rest- 
ing, her hospital had to be closed because there 
was no woman physician to keep the work going". 
In all the mission hospitals in India the same ques- 
tion keeps coming up, '^Who is there who could 
take over my work if I should be called away?'' 
Usually there is no one. There are hospitals in 
India which have to be closed for good because 
there are no doctors. In some places rich Indian 
princes have promised to build and equip hospitals 
if only we in America would send some doctors. 
But the missionary boards have been unable to 
find trained men or women willing to go, and so 
the opportunity has been lost. 

To help meet this need, the missionaries are 
now trying to train some of the native young 



ADVENTURES IN HEALING HI 

people in India to become doctors. A medical 
school for women was opened in North India years 
ago, and now a new medical school has been 
opened by Dr. Scudder in Vellore, in South India. 
In years to come she will not have to leave her 
hospital without a doctor. Some of her own girls 
will be able to carry on. In this school nearly all 
the students are Christian girls. Very few Hindu 
or Mohammedan girls are allowed to study long 
enough to gain a medical education. And of the 
Christian girls who are thus studying to help their 
own people, the majority come from the outcastes. 
They have learned that they too are human beings 
and can help each other in the spirit of Christ. 



CHAPTER EIGHT 

New Wonders in an Ancient Wonderland 

India lias often been called a wonderland. She 
has the highest mountains and some of the most 
glorious mountain scenery in the world. Her Taj 
Mahal is undoubtedly the most beautiful building 
in the world. The traveler from America, as he 
gazes at the trained elephants or the banyan trees, 
one of which can grow into a whole forest, or 
tastes the delicious tropical mangoes, or talks with 
some of India's learned men, such as the great 
poet Tagore, is almost sure to exclaim, '^What a 
wonderland this is ! " 

But the greatest wonders of today are of the 
kind which we have been studying in this book: 
poor farmers and their hungry families lifted into 
lives of comfort and happiness through cooper- 
ative banks and better methods of farming; little 
girls going to school and by-and-by to college, in- 
stead of being married before their childhood is 
over ; sick people cured by such physicians as Dr. 
Pennell and Dr. Scudder; and whole villages and 
whole provinces of wretched '' untouchables'' 
finding new pride of manhood in the love of 
Christ. 

Among the wonder stories of India are those 
of lives transformed and glorified through the 
spirit of God within the heart. 

112 



NEW WONDERS IN AN ANCIENT WONDERLAND 113 

Many years ago, a boy of twelve was driving a 
street-sweeper's cart in the army cantonment of 
a certain city in India. He heard that there was 
a strange Memsahiba (a married woman mission- 
ary) who every morning said prayers on her ver- 
anda and read to the people from a strange and 
interesting book and talked to them as though she 
really cared for them. One morning Mangal, with 
a boy friend of his, came to this Memsahiha^s 
house and listened while she read from the book. 
He was greatly interested. Belonging, as he did, 
to the sweeper caste, one of the '^untouchables,'' 
he had never been able to go to school. The high- 
caste Hindu boys would have made him too un- 
happy if he had tried to go to the government 
school where they were taught. So he came tim- 
idly to the Memsahiba and asked if it would ever 
be possible for him to learn to read. She told 
him to come to her as often as he could get away 
from his work. In time the boy learned to read 
and write his native Urdu, one of the many lan- 
guages of India. 

Not long after, an old Christian servant came 
to the missionary's house and said that he had a 
convert who wished to be baptized. It was Man- 
gal. In spite of the opposition of his family, who 
refused to have anything more to do with him, 
Mangal was baptized, and proved true to his faith. 
Some time later, when a community of sweepers 
asked for a worker to come and teach them, Man- 



114 THE WONDERLAND OE INDIA 

gal offered to go. He lived with them two or three 
years, teaching them what it would mean to live 
as Christians and studying intently whenever he 
could get hold of books. 

So well did he study that when, a little later, he 
applied for admission to the missionary theologi- 
cal school, he was accepted, although he had never 
been to school a single day in all his life. All his 
study had been with the Memsahiba or else by 
himself. In spite of this lack of the usual school- 
ing, Mangal stayed at the seminary and graduated 
at the head of his class. 

After graduation he took the name of Mangal 
Harris, in recognition of the American who fur- 
nished the money to help him gain his theological 
education. He became a great Urdu scholar famed 
for his learning, and a leader among the native 
Christian preachers. He was also famous for his 
lectures on Christianity, which were attended by 
crowds of Mohammedans and high-caste educated 
Hindus. A certain Hindu holy man, or sadhu, 
whom he converted to Christ, gave him the saffron 
colored robe which sadhus wear and told him to 
wear it as a Christian sadhu, which he did from 
that time on. In time he had the joy of seeing 
his own family, who had cast him off, won to 
Christ. 

When he died suddenly from cholera a few years 
ago, the whole city where he lived mourned for 
him, Christians and non-Christians alike. Had it 



NEW WONDERS IN AN ANCIENT WONDERLAND 115 

not been for the missionaries, that boy Mangal 
would have spent his life in ignorance, and all 
those wonderful gifts of soul and mind would 
have remained undeveloped and unused. 



About five thousand people were gathered at a 
mela in a little mountain villagei on the Eam 
Ganga, a tributary of the sacred river Ganges. 
The crowds bathed in the sacred waters, wor- 
shipped at the idol shrines, shopped at the many 
stalls of merchandise, and stopped now and then 
to listen to the preaching of two missionaries who 
stood among their little band of Christians. As 
the crowd drifted by, a woman missionary sud- 
denly clutched her husband's arm. '' There's a 
little girl from the Pauri school," she declared. 

The girl she saw was easily distinguished from 
the rest of the crowd. Her clothes were cleaner 
and of a somewhat different cut, and the material 
her dress was made of was that used in the mis- 
sion school at Pauri. 

By making cautious inquiries, the missionaries 
found that the child's name was Sita, a very com- 
mon name for girls in North India. Her father 
and mother had become Christians and had sent 
her to the Pauri school. Then her father and a 
brother had died, and the poor mother, deciding 
that the gods, as a curse for her turning Christian, 
had caused the death of her husband and the little 
boy, had stolen Sita from the school and gone back 



116 THE WONDERLAND OF INDIA 

to her own people. The two had walked nearly a 
hundred miles over the mountains, back to the 
mother's two brothers, who were blacksmiths. Ac- 
cording to Hindu law, a widow and her children are 
the property of either her husband's people or her 
own. These two brothers were poor, too poor to 
provide food for two more mouths, so they dressed 
up the mother and daughter in their best clothes 
and took them to the mela to be sold. 

By the time the missionary happened to see 
them, Sita and her mother were both afraid. The 
mother had begun to realize that the brothers were 
planning to sell them, and she was wishing that 
she and her little Sita were safely back at Pauri 
with the good teachers there. 

With the missionaries at the mela was a native 
Christian doctor who had been giving medical at- 
tention to many people who came to him at the 
missionary's tent. He was immediately informed 
of the little Christian girl and her mother, and 
when he hunted them up, he was able to persuade 
them to come with him. Before the blacksmith 
brothers knew what had happened, the two were 
taken to the nearest mission school, fifteen miles 
away. A year later the mother married the good 
doctor, and Sita, when she was old enough, was 
sent to Lai Bagh, the Isabella Thoburn School for 
girls. 

Twenty years after, the missionary whose wife 
had caught sight of Sita and her mother at the 



NEW WONDERS IN AN ANCIENT WONDERLAND ll? 

mela was on a journey among the villages of this 
mountain region. Going around a turn of the 
road, he met a well-dressed woman. To his sur- 
prise she called him by name. It was Sita ! She 
told him proudly that she was a doctor in a wom- 
an's hospital in the province of the Punjab in 
northwestern India. At that time she was at 
home on a visit. She had helped her stepbrother 
through medical school, and he too was now a 
doctor. 

That day's work at the mela and the years of 
quiet teaching which followed, have given to India 
two faithful servants whose whole lives are being 
spent in healing the sick and in scattering every- 
where the light of the good news of Christ. 



Another remarkable story comes from Mr. Hig- 
ginbottom's missionary farm at Allahabad. It is 
the story of Harry Dutt. Harry was the son of a 
native Christian preacher and was spoiled and 
lazy and unreliable. After one term at the Jumna 
Farm, Mr. Higginbottom told him he had better 
not come back, he was wasting his time. Harry 
became very angry, but finally begged for another 
chance. He was given ^ve acres of undeveloped 
land to see what could be done with it. The next 
year a delegation of Indian princes visited the 
mission farm. They were greatly pleased by all 
they saw, but were particularly impressed by one 
lot of five acres. ^'Who had charge of that?" 



118 THE WONDERLAND OF INDIA 

asked one of the men. Mr. Higginbottom called 
to a boy: ^'Come liere, Harry Dutt, the Mahara- 
jah is asking about your little farm." In time 
Harry Dutt was offered a fine position by the 
Maharajah as gardener-in-chief of his own private 
estate. The boy refused, however, because he 
preferred to teach farming in a mission school at 
a much smaller salary. Today he is one of the 
best teachers with Mr. Higginbottom at the Ag- 
ricultural Institute, helping to train other Indian 
farmer boys to help India. 



"Wonderful, also, is the story of the conversion 
of the criminal tribes of India. These are tribes 
who for generations have lived by stealing. Some 
are housebreakers, others are counterfeiters, 
others steal grain from fields and stacks. Our 
English word, ' ' thug, ' ' was the name of one of the 
most famous of these tribes. The Thugs were a 
tribe who robbed and strangled their victims. 
Their activities were entirely suppressed by the 
English Government years ago. The members of 
these tribes do not feel the slightest shame about 
their way of living. They consider it their trade, 
quite as respectable as farming or weaving or any 
of the other occupations of India. They are very 
religious after their fashion, each tribe worship- 
ping the god or goddess of their particular kind 
of thievery. The children, almost from babyhood, 
are taught clever methods of stealing and hiding. 



NEW WONDERS IN AN ANCIENT WONDERLAND 119 

Of course the government has tried desperately 
to break np this systematic stealing. Hundreds 
and thousands have been caught and sent to 
prison. But the moment such prisoners are re- 
leased, they go right back to their stealing again. 
Long prison terms do no good at all with men who 
have been brought up to suppose, as a matter of 
course, that they have a right to steal. 

Of late years the Government has turned to 
the missionaries for help. Many of these robber 
tribes, a whole tribe at a time, have been turned 
over to the missionaries to be supervised and 
taught in settlements. Industrial and trade 
schools and agricultural schools have been started 
among them; and these, together with patience 
and kindness and the glad tidings of Christ, have 
worked miracles.^ 

The first work of this kind was undertaken by 
the Salvation Army. At the start, the inside of 
the settlement, according to Booth-Tucker, the 
Salvation Army leader, was '^ pandemonium let 
loose, — the fighting, quarrelling, drinking, and 
gambling are indescribable. The squalor, the rags, 
the wretchedness are beyond words.'' Little by 
little, however, trade and farm schools were 
started. The girls were taught to weave and sew. 
As the children grew up, they discovered that they 
really liked to earn their living instead of stealing 

lAn interesting story of these tribes may be found in India on 
the March, (Chap. V), by Alden H. Clerk, published by the 
Missionary Education Movement. 



120 THE WONDERLAND OF INDIA 

it from other people. Today there are twenty- 
nine of these settlements under the Salvation 
Army alone, and each of the leading Christian de- 
nominations has at least one criminal tribe settle- 
ment under its care. 

A converted member of one of these tribes has 
been for many years a sirdar, or steward, at a 
certain mission in North India. On one occasion 
the missionary and his wife were called away sud- 
denly for a week's trip and in the excitement left 
open a safe in which large sums were sometimes 
kept. The sirdar soon discovered this, while mak- 
ing his rounds. He did not know how to close the 
safe, but for the next week, until the missionaries 
returned, he and his wife took turns watching 
night and day. Yet that man's ancestors for gen- 
erations were all thieves ! 



In the early days of missionary work, and for 
a long time afterwards, the missionaries from the 
West were the leaders. More and more, however^ 
the Indian Christians are conducting their own 
churches. The missionaries are eager to have 
them develop in this way, and so far as possible 
train them for Christian work. In one cityj where 
a missionary college is located, groups of school 
boys set out every Sunday morning from the mis- 
sion on tours through the native sections of the 
town. With each group of boys is a Christian 
college student or professor. They carry their 



NEW WONDERS IN AN ANCIENT WONDERLAND 121 

hymn-books and a large Bible picture roll which 
was first used in some Beginner ^s Sunday-school 
class in America and then sent to India. When 
they come to the chosen street, the boys sing a few 
Christian hymns and hang up the picture roll 
upon the trunk of some tree or against a wall. 
Soon a large crowd of Hindu boys and girls gather 
around, and the older student talks to them a 
little while about the picture on the roll, telling 
them the Bible story. Then the boys distribute 
colored Bible picture cards — also from America — 
and after a closing hymn or two, return to the 
mission. At Christmas time many of the little 
folks who have attended these street classes regu- 
larly are invited to the mission for a party and 
are sent home happy with sweets of one kind or 
another. 

Out of the classes of Christian boys who make 
these Sunday morning trips will come leaders who 
will know how to tell the good news of Christ to 
their own people. 



One of the most famous of the native Christian 
leaders is Sadhu Sundar Singh, a man who comes 
of a wealthy and educated family of Sikhs, a sect 
in the Hindu religion. Like Paul of old, he was 
full of zeal for the religion of his fathers, and 
again like Paul, to a certain extent he persecuted 
the Christians. To show his contempt for Chris- 
tianity, he publicly burned a copy of the Bible. 



122 THE WONDERLAND OF INDIA 

He planned to be a '4ioly man/^ or sadliu. He 
learned to sit and meditate for days at a time in 
one or the other of the seven sacred postures. 
But somehow, he never found peace. 

Three days after he had burned the Bible, at a 
quarter before six in the morning there came to 
him a wonderful vision. He believed, and still 
believes, that in this vision Jesus Christ came vis- 
ibly into his room. As a result of that vision, he 
proclaimed himself a Christian, and, instead of 
becoming a Hindu sadhu, he became a Christian 
sadhu, like Mangal Harris, and has gone all over 
India and into other countries, wearing a sadhu 's 
saffron colored robe. Not only has he preached 
the good news of Christianity to his own people, 
but he has gone into the Forbidden Lands — Tibet, 
Afghanistan, and Nepal. Thus he has been one of 
the first foreign missionaries to go out from 
among the native Christians of India. '^He gave 
me a message to take,'' says the Sadhu, ^^and I 
have gone. I have been put in prison and perse- 
cuted, but I have always been delivered." 

Sundar Singh has made many trips into Tibet, 
that strange, lofty, desolate plateau which is some- 
times called '^the roof of the world." Only a few 
foreigners have ever seen the capital city, Lhassa. 
Even today it is a dangerous proceeding to enter 
the country. 

The Sadhu has had some exciting experiences. 
He has been nearly frozen to death in snow-storms, 



NEW WONDERS IN AN ANCIENT WONDERLAND 123 

■charged by wild yak, — a kind of mountain buffalo, 
— and captured by bandits. On one occasion he 
so touched the hearts of the bandits that they re- 
stored his property, gave him tea, — alas, in a dirty 
cup, — and finally set him free. On another occa- 
sion he was thrown into a well forty feet deep, 
the top of the well was locked and the key was left 
in the girdle of the lama, the chief man of the vil- 
lage. '^I was there two days and two nights, and 
the third night somebody came and opened the 
well. I asked for help. He let down a rope and 
pulled me up. It was quite a dark night and I 
could not see him plainly. "When I was out of the 
well, he disappeared. I waited for him, but he did 
not return. Christ said, ^Lo! I am with you al- 
ways.' And He was with me.'' 



These are stories of only a few of the men and 
women who are helping to make India a country 
where boys and girls will have a chance to play 
and learn and be happy; a country where there 
will be physicians and medicine for all who are 
sick; a country where the people will forget the 
superstitions which make them fearful of every- 
thing; a country where there will be peace and 
contentment, and good-will and brotherhood, as 
well as beauty. There are still too few such men 
and women as Mangal and Sita and Sadhu Sundar 
Singh, They cannot do the work unaided. Mis- 
sionaries are still needed — our interest and help 



124 THE WONDERLAND OF INDIA 

are still needed. The better we come to know the 
people of India, the more we shall like them and 
the happier we shall be to give them what help we 
can and to be counted by them as their friends. 



WORD LIST 

As a general rule it may be said that in the Indian languages 
the vowels are pronounced in the Italian manner rather than the 
English ; i.e., like the vowels in do, re, mi, fa of the musical scale. 
There is a short a which is often found at the close of Indian 
words and sometinies elsewhere. It is pronounced like the a in 
aboard. Indian languages have nO flat a as in at. The u is pro- 
nounced like oil in soup. Many Indian words have an aspirated 
letter which appears as hh, dh, th, etc. This is given an explosive 
pronunciation like the hh in abhor. Strong accent upon one or 
more syllables of a word is not so common in the Indian languages 
as in English. Each syllable is given very nearly the same weight 
in speaking the word. 

For common place names, a pronouncing gazetteer should be 
consulted. For certain words from the text, the pronunciation 
of which is not immediately clear, the following phonetic form of 
spelling is given : 



Amrito (Am-ree-toe) 

Asoka ( A-so-kah ) 

atia-patia( ah-tee-ya-pah-tee-ya ) 

Bannu (Bun-noo) 
Baranagar ( Bah-rah-nug'-ger ) 
Bengali (Ben-gah'-lee) 
Bhajan (Bhud'-jun) 
Bodhisattva ( Bo-dhee-sat-wah ) 

chappatis ( cha-pah-tee ) 
Chittani ( Chit-tah-nee ) 

Dehra Dun (Day'-ra Doon) 
dhoti (dhoe-tee) 
Dilawar ( Dih-lah'-wahr ) 

fakir (fa-keer') 

Ganesh (Ga-naysh') 
Gautama (Goh-ta-ma) 
Ghazi ( Ga-zee ) 
Granamal ( Grah-na-mahl ) 
hookah ("oo" as in hook) 



Isai-log (Ee-sah-ee log, "o" 
in bold) 



as 



125 



Jhelum (Jhee'-lum) 

Jokhan Singh (Joe-khun Sing) 

Kshattriya (K-shut'-ree-a) 

lama (lah'-ma) 

Mahara j ah ( Mah-ha-rah-zhah ) 
Mamtaz-i-Mahal (Muum-tahz- 

ee-Ma-hahl') 
Mangal ( Mun-gul ) 
Marathi (Ma-rah'-tee) 
mela (may'-la) 

Memsahiba (maym-sah-heebba) 
Mukti (muuk'-tee) 
mullah (muul'-lah) 

pagri (pug'-ree) 
Pandita (pun-dee-tah) 
Pathan (Put-tahn') 
Pauri (Pow'-ree) 
Penina { Pe-nee'-nah ) 
Punjab (Puun-jahb) 

Rama ( Rahmma ) 
Ramabai { Rah-mah-bye ) 
rupee (roo-pee) 



126 THE WONDERLAND OF INDIA 

Sadhu (Sah-dhoo) 

Sahib ( Sah-heeb ) 

sari (sah-ree) 

Shukboo (Shuck-boo) 

Sita (See-tah) 

Siva ( See-vah ) 

Sonika ( Sohn'-ee-kah ) 

Srinagar ( Sree-nug'-ger ) 

Sundar Singh ( Suun-der-Sing) 

Taj Mahal (Tahj Ma-hahl') 
Tika Ram (Tee-kah Rahm) 

Vaishya (Vy'-sha) 

Yisu (Yee-soo) 

Verses on pages 60, 61 

Rajah Yisu, aiyah (Rah-zhah Yee-soo, eye-yah). 

Shaitan ko jitne ke liye (Shy-tahn koe jit-nee kay lee-ye), 

Yisu, misih ki Jai (Yee-soo mus-seeh kee jye). 




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